LANGGAARD; SCRIABIN 'Towards the Flame - Eccentric Piano Works' (Gustav Piekut)
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Instrumental
Label: Naxos
Magazine Review Date: 02/2022
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 56
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 8 574312
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
(3) Pieces |
Alexander Scriabin, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Sponsa Christi tædium vitæ |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Sonata for Piano No. 10 |
Alexander Scriabin, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Music of the Abyss |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Sonata for Piano No. 9, 'Black Mass' |
Alexander Scriabin, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
(The) Chambers of Flames |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Vers la flamme |
Alexander Scriabin, Composer
Gustav Piekut, Piano |
Author: Richard Whitehouse
Gustav Piekut doubtless raised eyebrows through making his recorded debut with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Danacord, 2019), and a similarly questing spirit seems no less evident in this judiciously assembled sequence of works by Scriabin and Langgaard.
It begins with the questioning, capricious then teasing epigrams of Scriabin’s Trois Morceaux (1905) – music at an aesthetic crossroads, from where the ‘virtuoso fantasy’ of Langgaard’s Sponsa Christi taedium vita (1944) strives fervently if fatalistically to a catharsis Scriabin had attained in his Tenth Sonata (1913). Its sound world of suns and insects inhabits less a state of grace than escape from reality that Piekut renders perceptively and with no mean finesse.
It is not necessarily a step back to the metaphysical angst of Langgaard’s Music of the Abyss (1921 24), with its trajectory from fractious disruption to a tumultuously ‘messianic’ encounter. Piekut is mindful to differentiate between music on the cusp and that which, as in Scriabin’s Ninth Sonata (1912), sets its inspiration at an appreciable distance; this Black Mass not so much experienced as conveyed by a stealthy abandon on both formal and expressive levels.
The final two pieces present their composers’ essential concerns at their most characteristic. In the case of Langgaard’s The Flame Chambers (1930 37), this involves an intense and finally self-destructive advance that can have no tangible destination, whereas with Scriabin’s Vers la flamme (1914) the journey, whatever its fanciful extravagance, is a logical and inexorable one towards an attainment born out of conviction in the self’s essential rightness of purpose.
Such is the impression of Piekut’s adept and involving performances, here accorded sound of admirable clarity while lacking a degree of depth. The subtitle of this recital is ‘Eccentric Piano Works’ yet, as Ken Kesey puts it, ‘He who marches out of step hears another drum’.
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