It’s more than 30 years since Vladimir Ashkenazy recorded Scriabin’s piano sonatas, a set that, despite some unevenness, remains one of the safest recommendations for these remarkable works. This new collection of miniatures, recorded just a few months ago, marks this year’s centenary of Scriabin’s death. The second half of Ashkenazy’s chronological trawl overlaps significantly with Garrick Ohlsson’s survey of Scriabin’s Poèmes, which was released at the beginning of the year by Hyperion, but Ashkenazy’s approach is quite different – more reflective and sometimes indulgent, very much viewing these pieces through the prism of Romanticism rather than that of modernism. Ashkenazy is at his most winning in the early Chopinesque pieces, the Mazurkas Op 3, the Studies Op 8 and Op 42 especially, but his account of the phantasmagoric Vers la Flamme, which gives the disc its title, as well as the set of late Preludes Op 74, are thrillingly persuasive, too, and he adds a Prelude by Yulian Alexandrovich Scriabin, the composer’s son, who was drowned in 1919 at the age of 11, as a touching epilogue.
