Stephen Coombs’s ‘The Early Scriabin’ follows his previous Hyperion recitals of Russian music by Arensky‚ Bortkiewicz‚ Liadov and Glazunov‚ but any suggestion that he has moved on to more familiar territory is triumphantly rebuffed in a programme of fascinating rarities played with a touching sensitivity and affection. Coombs’s accompanying essay – a mine of information and research lucidly and stylishly presented – tells the history of such oddities as the sombre D minor Canon and E minor Fugue (their titles essentially alien to Scriabin’s precociously romantic and far­reaching sensibility; to a composer happy to admit that at nine years old he already ‘knew love in the fullest sense of the word’) or the complex provenance of the masterly E flat minor Sonata. How intriguing‚ too‚ to hear a radically richer second version of the D sharp minor Etude‚ Op 8‚ and to note the subtle indirection of Scriabin’s writing in the first of his two Nocturnes‚ Op 5. He also tells us that Scriabin’s genius received short shrift from the academic ancien régime; allowing him to graduate in piano but not in composition – a chilling reminder of the short­sightedness of too many teaching establishments. Coombs’s performances are‚ for the most part‚ what painters call ‘low in tone’‚ and even when you wish for greater voltage in‚ say‚ the nightmarish equestrian finale of the Sonata (a quality relished by Bernd Glemser in his recent Naxos disc‚ 7/01) you can hardly wish for more gently persuasive accounts of the Waltzes or the A flat Nocturne‚ a bland Fieldian offering‚ though even here convention hardly disguises an already distinctive voice. He is much less dazzling and rhetorical than‚ for example‚ Leon Fleisher in the Prelude and Nocturne for the left hand (Sony‚ 10/93 – nla) but‚ conversely his playing suggests a subtly characterful and communing alternative. On the other hand he makes a full­blooded as well as finely graded assault on the cadenza just before the return of the principle idea in the Allegro appassionato so that‚ all in all‚ this record is a most impressive achievement‚ as beautiful in sound as it is endlessly thought­provoking.