There’s a sense that Scriabin’s Symphony No 1 picks up where Wagner left off, and Mikhail Pletnev approaches this sprawling work with both an ear for a yearning phrase and an eye for huge musical architecture. There is a Brucknerian sense of time slowing down, and the feeling, as in late Mahler, that the music is searching without a firm conviction that it will find anything. The Poem of Ecstasy, in which in 1908 Scriabin attempted to encapsulate his new-age-ish worldview, is headier, more ambitious and more condensed. Pletnev has supremely idiomatic forces, including the Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatoire and two fruitily old-school vocal soloists. Not everything is ideal – the first violins sound like a single player with an aura around him, and the organ in the Poem of Ecstasy is spliced in from literally a different country – but Pletnev’s is a very persuasive take on a repertoire most conductors seem shy of.
