This outwardly enticing disc suggests a division of theory and practice. For while it is interesting to hear Vasily Rogal-Levitsky's transcriptions of six of Scriabin's piano works, such music proves as resistant to arrangement, as inseparable from the keyboard as Chopin's. The four Preludes, Fragilite and the magnificent Funeral March from the First Sonata, with its central quasi niente glimpse into the void, all have their essential sharpness and character modified by the orchestra's more generalised sound.
The Piano Concerto, neglected, endearing and beloved by Rachmaninov (who tartly noted a 'wrong turning' in Scriabin's later works) emerges more satisfactorily, though by the time I had reached the finale's sumptuously unfolding melody at 1'32'' I began to long for greater voltage and a higher degree of poetic engagement from both soloist and orchestra. Scherbakov's initially winning delicacy comes to seem perversely restrained and never more so than in the triple forte return of the theme at 5'40'', or in the final pages which fail to take wing with the requisite dazzle and aplomb. He flickers adequately in and out of the orchestral texture in Prometheus though neither he nor his partners create the hallucinatory play of light and shade achieved by Argerich and Abbado in their live and enthralling Sony recording. In the Piano Concerto there is little competition for Ashkenazy's classic and vivid Decca account and the general air of sobriety is hardly helped by a poorly balanced soloist and an ill-defined orchestra.'