Conventional sets of the ten piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin typically present them in numerical order, which allows the listener to follow his musical development over the course of 20 years, from his early Chopin-inspired period to the late visionary works. On this 2015 release from Paraty, Varduhi Yeritsyan favors a different arrangement, separating them equally under two headings, "White Mass" and "Black Mass" (taken from the subtitles of the Sonata No. 7 and the Sonata No. 9, respectively), which one might guess separates the lighter and darker works. This is a bit misleading, since Scriabin didn't conceive his music within that dichotomy, and the highly varied sonatas are not well-served by such a simplistic categorization. Even so, Yeritsyan plays with phenomenal fluency, and whether she is radiating heat and light, as in the Sonata No. 4 and the Sonata No. 10, or brooding in the darkness of the Sonata No. 6, she fully grasps the technical demands of the music, even if its metaphysical import is harder for her to communicate. This may be for the best, because Scriabin's histrionic mysticism is sometimes a stumbling block, giving pianists permission to be self-indulgent, which the meticulous Yeritsyan never is, and her faithfulness to the printed score is worth more than the atmospheric imprecision some recordings reveal.
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