Yevgeny Sudbin - Scriabin & Medtner: Piano Concertos (2014) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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Yevgeny Sudbin - Scriabin & Medtner: Piano Concertos (2014) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner, eight years his junior, both studied at the Moscow Conservatoire in the 1890s, where their fellow students included Rachmaninov; it's Rachmaninov's spirit, and through him that of Chopin too, that hovers over Yevgeny Sudbin's pairing of these concertos. For Scriabin, Rachmaninov was an influence that he quickly shook off after the 1896 Piano Concerto in F sharp minor, but it proved far more persistent in Medtner's music; it s still very obvious in the Piano Concerto No 3 in E minor, completed in 1943 (the year of Rachmaninov 's death), which was one of his last major compositions. Sudbin is wonderfully dashing in the Scriabin, where the rapturous, refined playing of the Bergen Philharmonic under Andrew Litton also really comes into its own, especially in the finale. *** –Guardian, 8/1/15

It always seems slightly macabre that we should make such a song and dance about a composer's demise. But 2015 marks the centenary of Scriabin's death, and, since the catalogue is by no means as well-stocked with discs of his music as it is with that of his exact contemporary Rachmaninov, Scriabin-admirers (of whom I am an ardent one) will be hoping this anniversary yields up a good clutch of new recordings. BIS has got in first with this superb performance of the Piano Concerto by Yevgeny Sudbin and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton, coupled with the Third Concerto by Nikolay Medtner, whose other concertos Sudbin has compellingly championed on discs of the First and Second. He has also shown his close affinity with Scriabin in a disc embracing the Second, Fifth and Ninth Sonatas. Scriabin completed his Piano Concerto in 1897. Much beyond that date, you find his style shifting markedly and you also get tangled up in the web of weird, visionary philosophy that guided his later creative thinking. The Piano Concerto, however, still has strong links with the Romantic tradition, though a common mistake is to try to anchor it to any 19th-century convention. Sudbin recognises there is something very different about Scriabin even in this fairly early music a restless, rhythmically free quality which it is unwise to tie down, an evanescence in ideas and shapes that need a lightness of touch. In Litton and the Bergen orchestra, Sudbin has found like-minded partners who are willing to follow him in the music's liquid flow, and the result is a performance that is an exultantly truthful tribute to Scriabin's individuality and to the ways in which his harmonic vocabulary already bears signs of the instability that was to become much more pronounced later on. Medtner's Third Concerto, completed in 1943, ought, as Sudbin says in a booklet note, to sound more modern than the Scriabin, but, as he rightly concludes, it is the Scriabin that is the more experimental and daring. Nevertheless, this fine performance firmly establishes Medtner's stature and musical personality. –Telegraph, 18/1/15

These are superb performances of two underestimated concertos, of which Scriabin's is perhaps the best known. Sudbins's glistening and expressive virtuosity matched by Andrew Litton and the Bergen Phiharmonic's idiomatic playing. Performance ***** Recording ***** BBC MUSIC CONCERTO CHOICE.BBC Music Magazine, Feb'15 /// A finely detailed recording that puts Sudbin centre stage but not overly forward and you have a fascinating addition to the catalogue. Gramophone, Mar'15 /// Critics' Choice –Gramophone, Dec'15