Last year’s Scriabin anniversary – the centenary of his birth – produced some significant new recordings of a number of his piano works, especially Varduhi Yeritsyan’s cycle of the sonatas and Garrick Ohlsson’s collection of the Poèmes. But Scriabin’s huge number of preludes, 90 miniatures grouped into sets of various sizes, have not been so lucky, and the most easily accessible survey of them is still Piers Lane’s, which was first released on Hyperion in 2001.
Anthony Hewitt’s set groups the pieces chronologically, so that hearing the discs in succession vividly illuminates the way Scriabin’s musical language developed, and how the profoundly Chopinesque style of the early years was gradually deconstructed and finally abandoned in favour of something much closer to the atonality of early Schoenberg. Hewitt proves a faithful guide to every stage of this musical journey; occasionally he’s a little strident in the more bravura numbers, and perhaps too matter of fact in the rarefied world of the late sets, but his command and understanding of this neglected music is unmistakable.
