Yoojung Kim: Scriabin
Bridge Records

New York-based Korean pianist Yoojung Kim possesses the requisite technical skills to deliver this collection of solo piano pieces by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) with precision, but in informing her performances with an acute sensitivity to the music's lyrical dimension and overall form she distinguishes her presentation all the more. There are grandiose passages but intimate ones too, and Kim, a member of the Artist Faculty in Piano Studies at NYU Steinhardt, shows herself to be as adept at dazzling the listener with virtuosic passages as entrancing with episodes pitched at an introspective hush. Repeatedly, one is captivated by her expressive phrasing and dynamic control.

On the one hand, Scriabin's material hews to classical tradition; on the other, it ventures into mysticism and anticipates the move into atonality other composers would fully embrace (of the ten sonatas he composed, the last five eschew key signatures and include atonal gestures). In its incorporation of both traditional and idiosyncratic elements, it's a particularly fascinating and esoteric music that reflects the unusual trajectory of his life and career.

Following studies at the Moscow Conservatory, he performed as a pianist while also composing piano nocturnes, preludes, and etudes in a Romantic style inspired by Chopin. After obtaining a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory in 1898, Scriabin abandoned his wife and four children in 1903 for a six-year-stay in Europe that would see his writing develop in strikingly new and intensely personalized ways. His 1905 discovery of Theosophy proved pivotal in establishing a new ground for his musical thinking, with works such as Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus (1910) reflecting that turn. Now seeing music as a means by which to achieve mystical ecstasy, Scriabin boldly explored new harmonic ideas and chromatic effects. In 1915, he died of blood poisoning from an abscess on his lip, leaving behind a body of works whose spiritual dimension expanded increasingly across time. At the time of his passing, he was working on a grandiose theatre-piece called Mysterium he hoped to present in the Himalayas over seven days and nights as “the act of union between the Male-Creator and the Woman-World.”

Composed in 1900-01 during his tenure as a professor at the conservatory, the Fantaisie in B minor, Op. 28 is, as described by James M. Keller in liner notes, a dark work “of late-Romantic character, filled with grand gestures, extravagantly expressive, tending toward the morose.” At nine minutes, it's a substantial and at times majestic travelogue that Kim executes with characteristic finesse and clarity; here we're also presented with resounding evidence of the delicacy and agility with which she can play when the material calls for it. In placing the Sonata No. 2 Sonata-Fantasy in G-sharp minor, Op. 19 second, Kim abandons chronology for a piece written almost ten years earlier than the Fantaisie (though the programme thereafter adheres to a chronological sequence). Scriabin provided programmatic guides for its movements, describing the first as representing “the quiet of a southern night on the seashore” and the second as “the vast expanse of the ocean stormily agitated.” Moments of pensive stillness enhance the transporting beauty of the “Andante”; the “Presto,” by comparison, alternates between torrential and comparatively calmer sections.

Written in 1897-98, the Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp minor, Op. 23 announces a significant break from his earlier style: melodies become increasingly complex and the rhythms unpredictable, and degrees of ecstasy and turbulence permeate the twenty-minute work. Again he offered a programmatic account with, in this case, the soul plunging into an “abyss of suffering and strife” in the anguished first movement before finding illusory respite in the breezy second and turning wistful in the touching third; the turbulent fourth sees “the elements unleash[ing] themselves” and the Soul struggling within a “vortex of fury.” The Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp major, Op. 30 (1901-03) returns to the two-movement design of the second; for the fourth, however, Scriabin provided a programme in the form of a free verse poem that aligns with the music—a dreamy and introspective “Andante” and tumultuous “Prestissimo volando”—and describes the protagonist as leaping toward a star with which, it having expanded into a sun, he ecstatically merges.

May 2024