Scriabin Dynasty [CD]

An illuminating introduction to the musical riches of the wider Scriabin family, unrivalled in the catalogue, presenting many unfamiliar names and unknown pieces within the noble lineage of the Russian piano tradition. In a generous 85-minute survey, the pianist Matteo Cardelli presents piano music composed over a period of exactly 150 years by musicians who are all related (either by blood or by marriage) to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). Scriabin took his first lessons at the piano with his mother, who had studied with the renowned pedagogue Theodor Leschetitzky at the conservatoire in St Petersburg. This chronologically ordered recital presents some of the striking pieces from his adolescence, including a pair of fugues and a more elaborate Fantasy in A minor, The most extensive piece on the album is the little-known 'Symphonic Allegro' which Scriabin wrote in 1896, possibly as the first movement of a never-completed symphony, and which Leonid Sabaneyev then transcribed (after the composer's death) as a Poeme en forme d'une sonate. Julian was the sixth of Scriabin's seven children, born in 1908 to his mistress Tatiana Shlotzer; Paul de Schlozer was Tatiana's uncle. Julian drowned in the Dnieper river at the age of just 11;the maturity of those few compositions he left is all the more remarkable: the Prelude Op.2 is the longest and most complex of them, alternating a hypnotic, suspended harmonic sequence with a tumultuous Presto, and thus evoking the same fantastical world created by his father in later compositions such as the Fifth Piano Sonata. Also born to Tatiana was Marina, the last of Scriabin's children, in 1911. Living until 1998, she composed this rigorously ordered, atonal set of theme and variations at some point in the 1940s. Daniel Lazarus was Scriabin's grandson, born to his fifth child Ariadna, and his set of Six Pieces reflect the turbulent era of their composition in the early 1920s, evoking styles from Schubert to Prokofiev. Robert Cornman married Ariadna's eldest daughter, Tatiana-Myriam; his Sonata brevis owes something to Copland. Their son - and thus Scriabin's great-grandson - is Julian Cornman, born in 1953, whose Rondeau adopts a neo-Baroque language with a sidelong glance at musical history. In this way, Matteo Cardelli takes the listener on a musical journey through the Scriabin, de Schloezer, Lazarus and Cornman families, from Romantic piano studies based on Liszt's models to the current postmodern era, through the complex and tragic history of the 20th century and up to the present day.