These are two well-filled medium-price discs from an undoubted master-pianist playing very much on home ground. How can it be that they afford so little pleasure? The root of the problem is anyone's guess (I suspect it boils down to a kind of over-compensation), but the symptoms are that in at least seven of the ten sonatas the piano sound is over-projected to the point of grotesqueness. It is almost as though Ashkenazy had deliberately had the instrument toned down so that he would have to pound extra-hard to make a proper fortissimo in the middle of the dynamic range he trains a searchlight on the music as though afraid that the listener might lose interest (which might conceivably be the case with the Second Sonata, but surely not with the others); and even when he achieves a true dolcissimo (the opening of the Fourth Sonata is not remotely that, but he does get it in the Fifth) the spell all too quickly evaporates. In a word, the playing lacks intimacy.
The exceptions to this are the Sixth and Eighth Sonatas, from the disc I reviewed in October 1987. These are remarkable exploratory works, the one picking up all sorts of hints from Ravel's Gaspard the other pointing the way forward to the Debussy Etudes. Ashkenazy's identification with their restrained but inwardly turbulent moods is altogether remarkable and the more valuable for the fact that these particular sonatas are among the less-often played. The First Sonata (a rare example of unbridled self-pity in music) is not without its over-vehement passages, but it is not disfigured to the same extent as those recorded in the 1970s. I would stress that the problems with this issue arise not from any basic defidency but only from exaggeration of the good things in Ashkenazy's playing. He feels the essential febrility in Scriabin the urge for emotional, even, as the composer admitted, sexual elevation; his technical grasp enables him to go for total clarity at the same time. But the fact remains that forcefulness can be, and in this instance is, overdone. Ashkenazy's Sixth and Eighth Sonatas will remain exemplary. The outstanding Fifth is Richter's (DG) and Horowitz reigns supreme in the Ninth and Tenth (now in a three-CD set from CBS).'