It is five years since I reviewed Volume 1 of Bernd Glemser’s Scriabin piano sonata cycle (8/96), but Volume 2 is worth the wait. First, it is enterprisingly planned so that any listener hearing the entire programme at a single sitting has a sense of the vivid, zig-zag trajectory of the composer’s genius. The Third Sonata’s far-flung romanticism (sub-titled ‘States of Soul’, its typical ambition includes ‘thoughts beyond expression’) is followed by the Tenth Sonata’s obsessive opalescent world. Then, most intriguingly, there is the early 1889 E flat minor Sonata’s more accessible virtuosity and, finally two notably characterful and intricate encores.
As in Volume 1, Glemser proves himself a powerful and committed Scriabin pianist, even when his lack of finesse – of balance and texture – creates an insufficiently memorable experience of the Third Sonata’s glowing Andante and makes much of the first movement sound more bombastic than dramatico. His performance of the Tenth Sonata again lacks the light and shade achieved by other more finely tuned pianists (has anyone ever equalled Horowitz’s nervous intensity and charisma in this Sonata?) but he soars towards the pulsating climax (puissant, radieux) with a true sense of its volatility, concluding with an impressive feel for the final piu vivo’s hallucinatory play. In the E flat minor Sonata’s Andantino he finds much of the poetry missing from his performance of the Third Sonata and achieves a thrilling romantic turbulence in the presto finale. Vers la flamme, too, builds inexorably to its final apocalyptic blaze of light so that all in all this recital takes its place with the many other recent and distinguished Scriabin recordings.
Naxos’s sound is sometimes close and airless but Glemser’s performances make one look forward to the third and final volume