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A recital by Grigory Sokolov
is like a vision of a lost age of Russian pianism. There is a wonderful
ease about his playing, a security founded on a technique that seems
utterly dependable, and a sense that every interpretation is founded upon
total familiarity. This is an artist who knows his repertory inside out,
yet still manages to conjure a sense of discovery in his performances, as
if he were inviting the audience to listen to the music as if it were a new
work.
What you get in the performances is not necessarily to everyone's
taste, though. Sokolov launched into Schubert's C
minor Sonata D958 with tremendous gusto, driving his way through the
opening theme, but then slowed down and fussed with the second subject
group. There was more cosmetic rubato in the slow
movement but what emerged was still a wonderfully coherent sense of the
whole sonata, spun from an opalescent thread of tone, with every element
perfectly in scale; even when you did not know what was coming next, you
sensed it would be totally integrated.
But the real
revelations came in a Scriabin sequence, which
was played chronologically, with scarcely a break between the items. The centres of gravity were two of the sonatas, the Third
and the Tenth - the earlier of them still assimilating the romanticism of
Chopin, and full of pianistic efflorescence to
which Sokolov gave a fluid, airy lightness; the
later one perhaps the greatest, most intense of Scriabin's
late works. If Sokolov's account of the Tenth
could not quite replicate the demonic intensity of Vladimir Horowitz's
definitive recording, it was still hugely impressive on its own terms,
technically outstanding and holding the structure together with total
confidence, just as he drove the even later and more obsessive poem Vers La Flamme to a
cataclysmic climax.
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