CD in Review: Accentus Music presents Pianist Yunjie Chen
Alexander Scriabin: The Complete Piano Sonatas
Yunjie Chen, piano
Accentus Music CD ACC306391 (2 CD set)
In the pantheon of solo piano compositions that tax a performer’s technical and musical capabilities to the outer limits, the ten Scriabin piano sonatas, written from 1892 to 1913, rank high. Though none is longer than 20 minutes (and most far shorter), they are black holes of condensed emotional expression that exploit every register, figurational possibility, rhythmic combination, and tonal resource of the piano keyboard with a feverish intensity unique to this singular composer. They gradually evolve from multi-movement late Romantic works in sonata form with key signatures, to one-movement, intense, trance-like excursions without key signatures that morph instantaneously from ineffable pianissimo puffs of smoke to ecstatic bursts of joy or madness, with the notes chromatically spelled in a chaotic, non-functional-harmony manner. Musicologist Richard Taruskin dubbed Scriabin’s compositional style “maximalist.”
Of the great pianists of the last century, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Vladimir Sofronitsky (Scriabin’s son-in-law), all Russians, were especially identified with Scriabin’s music, largely because each had a wild, wayward side to their musical personalities that matched the sensibility of the composer, a man obsessed with theosophy, synesthesia, mysticism, and other other-worldly notions. Effective performances of Scriabin must bring alive this exorcismic, phantasmal side of his music while contending with the extraordinarily dense, complex textures. Usually only a single sonata is programmed on a piano recital, though several artists have recorded the whole cycle. I well remember seeing Vladimir Ashkenazy’s April 1982 Carnegie Hall recital where he led off with a tenebrous performance of Sonata No. 6 and a few short pieces from Scriabin’s middle period, followed by Gaspard de la Nuit and Pictures at an Exhibition–a marathon all without missing a note.
But the Chinese pianist Yunjie Chen may be the first pianist both to record the whole Scriabin sonata cycle and to perform all ten sonatas in a single recital, in 2015 in Beijing, an unimaginable tour de force of mental and physical stamina. (The young Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko duplicated the live feat in 2022.) If that doesn’t impress you, consider that Yunjie Chen has also performed the complete Liszt Transcendental Etudes both live in a single recital and on recordings. Mr. Chen, born 1980, trained at the Shanghai Conservatory and completed degrees in the United States at Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has widely concertized across the world and is currently on the faculty of the Central Conservatory in Beijing.
Throughout these recordings (Accentus Music: Scriabin Piano Sonatas- Yunjie Chen), Yunjie Chen shows himself to be a pianist of formidable technique, a sensitive musician, and a master of pianissimo shading. He always does an excellent job of outlining melodies that Scriabin characteristically puts in the middle of the texture while the hands are surfeited with activity above and below. That he has given a lot of thought and study to Scriabin’s idiom is clearly apparent from the very first sonata, performed with lots of rubato, dynamic nuance, and occasional luftpauses at unexpected moments. I marveled at the exquisitely pedaled veiled, muted tone he gave to the Quasi Niente pppp bars at the very end of the fourth movement of Sonata No. 1. In Sonata No. 2, perhaps the most Chopinesque of the ten, Mr. Chen’s fingers deftly flit through the quasi-aqueous figuration and filigree.
The four-movement Sonata No. 3 may be the easiest and most conventionally lyrical-romantic of the sonatas, but it is still passionately, darkly Scriabin. Pianists have wildly differed on the interpretation and pace of the Allegretto second movement, though the score is metronomically marked eighth note equals 160 in 4/8 meter. In his famous 1960s studio recording, Glenn Gould plays the opening of this movement secco, marking the rhythm almost as in a march as he hums along audibly. Ashkenazy puts the pedal down. Mr. Chen not only pedals the opening but impulsively lurches past the metronome marking, almost collapsing the beats into each other and making a blur of the notes–an interpretive mistake to my ears. In the very last bars of the fourth movement, where the score has two large grand pauses clearly marked to divide the antepenultimate and penultimate phrases, Mr. Chen holds the pedal down right through the pauses, effectively eliminating their dramatic musical punctuation.
The transitional sonatas are Nos. 4 and 5, where Scriabin starts enriching the chromaticism of his harmony almost enigmatically, with short, gasping gnomic phrases floating around like musical amoebas that lead nowhere. In the 4th he starts dividing the keyboard into registers, separate planes of color and texture on three staves. In the 5th and later sonatas, he writes in one continuous movement and starts to use unusually specific expressive indications, at first in Italian, then in French (sample from the 9th : avec une douceur de plus en plus caressante et empoissoneé).
Chen’s performance of the 5th is one of his most successful, though he tends to favor inserting tiny pauses between slow and fast bars where most other pianists would ride through them observing the prevailing beats, as Richter does, which heightens the excitement by not breaking the line. The last page of the 5th sonata is very difficult to bring off musically because it seems as if the composer is running out of harmonic steam and the piece just stops rather than ends. Audiences often don’t recognize the ending and wait to clap. I’ll never forget Horowitz’s stage-smart performance of this ending at his November 1974 recital at the Metropolitan Opera House: he physically turned his whole body to face the audience as he played the final figuration at the top of the keyboard, provoking an instant deafening roar of cheers.
Starting with Sonatas Nos. 6 and 7, there are no key signatures. As the Sonatas become more esoteric in their harmonic language, Mr. Chen, though capturing the mood admirably, tends to underplay some notes in the apparent belief that suggestion is more idiomatic than clear articulation. Indeed the Sixth is arguably the creepiest of the sonatas, but I couldn’t hear some of the important ornamentation in the score. The recurrent ornamental grace note quadruplet pattern in bars 44, 63, etc. I couldn’t hear at all. It should be clearly articulated. The so-called “White Mass” Sonata No. 7 is possibly the most technically difficult of the sonatas to play, with the scoring sometimes on four staves, and its famous bar 331: five five-note chords stacked vertically on a single arpeggiated quarter note rolled upward. While Mr. Chen does a masterful job of delicate subito dynamic contrasts, he sometimes doesn’t make the runs or ornamentation speak.
The more recessive, intimate Sonatas Nos. 8 and 10 seem best suited to Mr. Chen’s personality and style and he plays them beautifully. In Sonata No. 9 some of the written pitches didn’t sound, particularly in the precipitous piú vivo section at bars 205-208, an awkward, notorious stumbling block for even the best pianists.
His choice to emphasize suggestion of the tones by caressing the keys rather than actually with distinct articulation sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. There were many instances in different sonatas where I just couldn’t hear notes clearly delineated, or sometimes hear them at all. Overall, Mr. Chen plays the bass line too sotto voce in all the sonatas, causing an important part of the Scriabin gestalt– not to mention the piano’s frequency spectrum– to lose some presence and definition. Not every fine performance of Scriabin has to have clangorous Horowitzian sforzando bass chords, but the authority of bass resonance has to sound boldly in idiomatic Scriabin, and is needed to balance the sound texture with the high treble filigree. Like many pianists in Scriabin, Mr. Chen sometimes overuses the pedal and forfeits the expressive effect of subito secco.
Perhaps Mr. Chen doesn’t have that demonic over-the-top quality that a few rare pianists bring to this music. Yet to be sure he does successfully summon up and sustain a suitably mystagogic Scriabinesque sound world. This collection is a highly listenable and rewarding release, provided the listener is given the caveat that a surfeit of Scriabin may throw your emotional dials temporarily out of whack!
