Naxos appears to be surveying Scriabin’s piano works by genre, and assigning a different pianist at each post, so to speak. The Russian pianist Evgeny Zarafiants takes responsibility for the Preludes. Volume One contains all of Scriabin’s Preludes up to and including the Op. 17 set. Save for the teenage composer’s B major Prelude Op. 2 No. 2, the works date from Scriabin’s mid-20s and reveal his individual style taking wing away from Chopin’s strong influence. Zarafiants paces the 24 Preludes of Op. 11 more deliberately than is usual. His probing rubatos tend to blur the bigger picture in a way that never happens with, say, Horowitz’s equally subjective conceptions. At the same time, he takes pains to the point of exaggeration in order to clarify Scriabin’s textual distinctions. The B-flat minor Prelude (a tribute to the final two movements of Chopin’s Funeral march Sonata), for instance, gets an intriguing dissection rather than a blurred run-through. Conversely, Zarafiants saves his scintillating tools for the shorter Op. 13 through 17 Prelude groups. The catalog is well stocked with excellent versions of selected Scriabin Preludes from Richter, Horowitz, and Sofronitsky, along with Marta Deyanova’s strongly profiled Op. 11 on Nimbus. The question now is how Zarafiants will fare in the later, mystical opus numbers. Watch this space for Volume Two. The sound is fine, but the piano fails to hold its tuning.
