Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner, eight years his junior, both studied at the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1890s, where their fellow students included Rachmaninov; it’s Rachmaninov’s spirit, and through him that of Chopin too, that hovers over Yevgeny Sudbin’s pairing of these concertos. For Scriabin, Rachmaninov was an influence that he quickly shook off after the 1896 Piano Concerto in F sharp minor, but it proved far more persistent in Medtner’s music; it’s still very obvious in the Piano Concerto No 3 in E minor, completed in 1943 (the year of Rachmaninov’s death), which was one of his last major compositions. Sudbin is wonderfully dashing in the Scriabin, where the rapturous, refined playing of the Bergen Philharmonic under Andrew Litton also really comes into its own, especially in the finale, but he makes heavier weather of the much darker, almost gruff Medtner; the performance never really takes wing as one feels it wants to and really should, though that’s as much a problem of the music as of the way it’s presented here.
