For Igor Shukow, a former student of Gilels and Neuhaus, “Scriabin followed no one and left none to follow him”; an echo of Stravinsky’s “Scriabin, where does he come from, where does he go?” Asked if he was a Wagnerian, Shukow replied with typical aplomb, “No, I am a Scriabinist”. And it is true that his 10 piano sonatas take you on a unique journey through early near-suicidal despair, through the wild syncopations of Sonatas Nos 4 and 5, the neurotic obsessions of Nos 6-8, before finally dark and opalescent mystery in Nos 9 and 10. The pianist’s task is immense, and Shukow, who I remember as a genial if eternally smoking jury colleague, is a warmly committed Romantic.

Alas, his great days were clearly behind him when he made this three-disc set. His heart may be in the right place but his fingers struggle to do his bidding, wrestling with Scriabin’s whirling and turbulent patterning. The Fourth Sonata’s dizzying finale is neither prestissimo nor volando and Shukow’s flabby rhythm in the Third Sonata’s Allegretto suggests a fundamental insecurity. A pallid forte (Scriabin’s cry of despair) ends the First Sonata’s concluding and magnificent funeral march, and time and again in the sonata’s more strenuous pages (of which there are many) he comes close to going under. There is a higher degree of success in the dark underworld of Sonatas No 6-8 but overall there is no comparison with either Ashkenazy’s (Decca, 1/90) or Hamelin’s (Hyperion, 6/96) complete sets. There are also star performances elsewhere (Horowitz’s savage whipped-up intensity in Sonatas Nos 3, 5, 9 and 10 and some individual wonders from Pogorelich, Volodos and Sudbin). Telos’s sound has come up well but these are tired performances of music demanding razor-sharp reflexes and another sort of delirious brilliance.