Dec 17th 2015

Pianist Yeritsyan offers a fresh take on Scriabin sonatas

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas serve as a guide to his journey from Romantic to atonal composition, 20 years in the making. His innovations took him into obscure, abstract territory but rescued him from being labeled a mere Chopin copycat, his starting point.

Alexander Scriabin, a drawing by Michael Johnson, the author

A new CD of the complete piano sonatas played by Varduhi Yeritsyan (Paraty 915136) demonstrate this sweep, beginning in 1893 and continuing to 1913.  

Ms. Yeritsyan has injected an innovation of her own. Contrary to most recordings of this oeuvre (and there are many), she organizes the collection according to her perceptions of light and dark coloristic shadings, not chronology. To the listener, the new sequencing makes excellent sense. The tracks cohere musically and avoid the jarring contrasts that actually occurred in Scriabin’s troubled evolution.

Program notes by Ms. Yeritsyan reveal her diligent research into the composer’s life, which she recapitulates chronologically. The mood of Sonata No. 1 in F-minor indicates, she says, that the Funebre movement may reflect the “severe nervous crisis” he was suffering in 1893. Being a dark selection, she offers this on the second CD, for which she borrows the label “Black Mass”, a sobriquet originally applied posthumously to Sonata No. 9. 

The first CD, labeled “White Mass”, opens with No. 10, which Scriabin called his “insects’ sonata”. The trills and tremolos evoke “a sensuality as subtle as it is ardent”. It is a small leap to imagine the insect world.

His break with Romantic traditions demarked his move toward individuality.  Critic Harold Schonberg wrote in his book The Lives of the Great Composers, “Nobody had conceived of this kind of piano writing.”

Ms. Yeritsyan seems made for Scriabin’s virtuoso world of color and tone. She respects his Chopinesque phase and turns poetic in her fluent approach to the single-movement later works where traditional structures are absent.  One of her strengths is to unify the ideas in each sonata from opening chords to climax into a musical whole.

To appreciate these muscular yet richly colorful creations it is best to drink in the music uncritically over multiple hearings. I played her discs repeatedly for a week, never tiring of her brooding or brilliant effects.

Ms. Yeritsyan has rapidly established herself as an accomplished interpreter of challenging solo and chamber repertoire, from Bach through the Armenians, the Russians and the French. Her expressive, dramatic style at the keyboard is apparent in these excerpts:

She studied originally in her native Armenia at the Tchaikovsky Specialized Music School, then on to the Paris Conservatoire where she graduated with honors and completed a double postgraduate cycle. She was mentored by Brigitte Engerer.

Her commitment to Russian music led to her interest in Scriabin, with all his bold innovations and all his human faults. In this centenary year of his death, commemorative recitals and CD releases have proliferated, among which Mrs. Yeritsyan’s offering stands proud.

Even the literary press has taken an interest in the controversial old Russian, recalling how he was shamed and humiliated early in his composing career by being labeled a ‘Romantic anachronism”. Princeton University Prof. Simon Morrison wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that Scriabin sought to express the “boundlessness of desire”, leading him to “make up scales, invent new sounds and search for colorations between chord and color”.

Ms. Yeritsyan fearlessly rises to this challenge.

 

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Mar 15th 2018

The Brahms Scherzo Op. 4 opens with a delicate and playful theme, then carries us along on waves of emotion swinging from the filigree, to the lyrical, the thunderous, and back to the delicate.

Mar 9th 2018

Perhaps enough time has passed since the death of the famous French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger to step back and question her musical sainthood. After all, she was only human. 

Feb 21st 2018

A new “electronic opera” from Ireland, “Heresy”, broke new ground in contemporary opera a couple of years ago, bringing together Irish vocal talent and the synthesized music of much-decorated composer Roger Doyle.

Feb 4th 2018

Elegant, poised and deeply musical Ran Jia has brought a new freshness to the Franz Schubert piano sonatas, a phenomenal achievement considering how often they have been performed by the greatest pianists of the past 75 years.

Jan 31st 2018

American expat pianist David Lively found happiness in Paris as a teen-aged piano prodigy and got so busy performing and studying  -- with an Alfred  Cortot associate -- that he ended up making his life in France, a “different planet” culturally, he says, compared to that of his native land. 

Jan 26th 2018

When young French pianist François Dumont appeared at the Salle Gaveau in Paris recently, the critics embraced him without reserve. One wrote that his recital “confirmed his place in the family of the best musicians in France”.

Jan 13th 2018

Nearly two hours of Debussy’s solo piano music at one sitting can be, for some, too much impressionistic color to digest. And indeed a woman beside me fell asleep during the twelve Préludes, Book One.

Nov 29th 2017

In the world of classical music trios, there are few combinations as natural as the cello, guitar and piano. Operating mostly in the same register, attacking and retreating equally, the instruments can blend beautifully if played with discipline and heart. 

Nov 3rd 2017

A California polymath has electrified the music world with his images of classical music in visual form, capturing more than 165 million hits on his Internet postings in just a few years.  Only pop singers or weird videos do better. 

Oct 30th 2017

Ukrainian-born Evgeny Ukhanov, based in Australia for the past 20 years, is an established performer of new music originating in his adopted homeland. Now he has teamed up with friend and Melbourne composer Alan Griffiths on a new CD of selections regrouped under the title “Introspection”. 

Sep 9th 2017
 

If music makes you happy or sad, you are probably an average listener. If it leaves you indifferent, you might be considered insensitive. But if it gives you goosebumps you are in a very special group with connections in your brain anatomy that others may never feel.

Aug 31st 2017

Lake Como, known as the “magic lake” of Italy, has inspired writers and composers for centuries with natural surroundings so conducive to creative expression.

Aug 16th 2017
File 20170815 15219 g8geue

Much of the mythology that surrounds Elvis Presley, who died 40 yea

Aug 2nd 2017

Katia and Marielle Labèque -- the glamorous French keyboard siblings -- have achieved a solid legacy of exuberant performances in the two-piano repertoire, ranging from experimental contemporary works to traditional classical-romantic composers.

Jun 24th 2017

I was flipping through my copy of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 recently and spotted his two “col pugno” markings. My memory took me back many years to the day I first encountered these violent directions. At the time, I didn’t know what to think.

Jun 21st 2017

One of the world’s greatest living violinists, Maxim Vengerov, accompanied by an equally accomplished pianist Roustem Saïtkoulov, dazzled a full house at the 18th century Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux Sunday night (18 June) with a faultless concert.

Jun 17th 2017

A classical-trained German pianist working in a range of musical disciplines has just launched his most audacious experiment yet – an original piano sonata consisting almost entirely of creations from his unconscious mind.

Jun 5th 2017

The Orchestre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine added another feather to its cap last week (June 1-2) with the engagement of a leading international guest conductor, Michail Jurowski, who led the ONBA in two demanding orchestral pieces, the Shostakovich Symphony No.

May 24th 2017

Taking a break in gaps between a Mozart piano concerto in Izmir, Turkey, (No. 9, “Jeunehomme”), a recording session of three Mozart concertos in Rennes, France (Nos.