Scriabin Complete Piano Sonatas - Cernadas
The music of Александр Скрябин is not in regular rotation around here, but just as you might go on a short health kick eating kale salads for a week to realign your body, I too must take departures from my study of baroque repertoire. Scriabin is an interesting composer for his embrace, early on, of Chopin and his later adoption of atonality in his musical lexicon (or as the Wikipedia states, a more “dissonant musical language”). It is also of special note to me that he lived during the time my maternal grandmother was born.
For those not familiar with his sonatas, this description by PrefatoryAction on Reddit served me well. Nuno Cernadas, a young but accomplished Portuguese pianist, chose Scriabin’s sonatas as the fodder for his debut solo album.
As far as the recording is concerned, the album has a huge dynamic range, as far as Roon measures albums, with a score of “17.” The dynamics expressed in the first track, from the first sonata in F minor, showcases the care in which the dynamic range is expressed, impressive for a recording at CD resolution. The piano is well-captured, I think, with an acoustic that reminds me of a concert hall. We’re put up close, not at the bench, but clearly in the first couple of rows. The recording captures all of the piano without any mechanical noises.
Focusing on the music, among my favorites among his sonatas is the ninth sonata, op. 68, called “Black Mass.” As a later work, it embraces the composer’s late style of tonality. I wouldn’t myself call it atonal; instead the piece meanders to where it needs to go, but I appreciated Scriabin’s sense of form and how the piece unfolds like a story, leading somewhere. For those who appreciate Debussy’s tonal language, this piece should find within you some rapport.
Hearing the third sonata next (op. 23), arranged in a more formal and perhaps traditional four distinct movements, the style is completely different. It’s remarkable how the composer traversed over fifteen years in terms of style. The opening movement, marked Drammatico is clearly a romantic piece, dramatic, perhaps, in its starts and stops, but it reminds me of a composer who is painting in sound. I feel as if I’m being taken on a tour of the interior of a great building. Where a repeated rhythmic figure gives the piece familiarity as it unfolds, the Scriabin plays with harmonic surprises to, well, delight us. That, I guess, isn’t entirely removed from his approach in the Black Mass sonata (op. 68).
Cernadas’s articulation in the Allegretto of the F-sharp minor sonata, alongside his performance of the opening of the F minor sonata (op. 6) is well done. Props to the recording engineer who manages to capture the space between the chords, without the piano sound smearing together.
I’m reminded of Debussian harmonies in the Andante in the same F-sharp minor sonata. My first thought was that he’s pulled out his paint brush again. Cernadas’s control is strong in this movement, there are rubato touches to the pulse through which he allows the melodic material to push things.
The final movement, marked Presto con Fuoco, like the first movement, has some dramatic moments. This one probably linked Scriabin the most for me, to Chopin’s style, but he plants a few nice harmonic surprises that I wouldn’t have expected from Chopin.
This sonata is performed by Yuja Wang (DG, May 2024), who in the last movement, is overall a harder player. I have not listened to much of Glenn Gould’s recordings aside from his Bach and Mozart; his rendition of the last movement lacks the dynamics and dynamic range of Cernadas’ recording. The Gould surprised me for being serviceable, but both the touch by Cernadas and his instrument are superior. He’s also committed to exploring the phrasing within the larger phrase structures. His variation in dynamics, too, I think, betters the recording by Wang.
The seventh sonata, “White Mass,” op. 64, too adopts a painterly approach, although the color I see at the beginning is not white, but charred ruins. The name of the piece is a reference to celestial heavens, and while I have not investigated more into what the composer was thinking, my mind goes to floating through clouds, but not white, instead clouds that are all kinds with crazy colors. It’s an apt metaphor to describe the work’s heavily chromatic harmonies. Cernadas feels confident throughout, which may be the composer’s most difficult sonata.
“White Mass” evidently was composed in reaction to the composer’s sixth sonata, op. 62. All these later sonatas are presented as single movements without pause. The lengths for me (10-13 minutes) are about right. This one is no more atonal than the seventh, but while the composer played with rows, the triadic fundamentals to many of the harmonies keeps it aligned as a quasi-tonal piece. Cernadas handles the dramatic and loud bits in the piece’s first third well.
I compared Cernadas’ performance to that of Vladimir Ashkenazy, from his 1987 recording on Decca. While the older recording can’t match the dynamic range in this new one, I did like some aspects of Ashkenazy’s phrasing. He takes portions slower, letting us a bit more time to luxuriate in some of the chords Scriabin is painting with. And around mid-way? There’s an outburst where Ashkenazy is willing to wake us up using the full power of his instrument, more so than Cernadas is. The ending shows us Scriabin trying to reconcile all the different motivic components of the piece together. It’s a little underwhelming. I felt Ashkenazy’s interpretation, here, again, was superior; not only for getting more drama from his instrument, but in how he treated the runs in the right hand as effects more than a simple motif. The ending’s demureness worked for me better after the series of repeated rhythmic outbursts.
Finally, the op. 19, second sonata in G-sharp minor is a two-movement work. Written ahead of the turn of the twentieth century, it holds on to a clearer romantic harmonic language. Where things go, however, aren’t formulaic at all; in this way, Scriabin, as ever, is bound to surprise us. There’s a layering going on among the two hands, and Cernadas maintains good control of the different lines, highlighting one over the other, keeping the melodic material focused. Which turns to be difficult, I think, when the composer goes south, with some fully-voiced chords in the piano’s lower register.
The second movement, marked Presto is about half the length of the first movement, under Cernadas’ fingers. The composer alternates between figures that highlight the harmonies, and then running melodic figures. Without doing any analysis, Wagner’s harmonic language was brought to my mind.
I wanted to compare here Cernadas’ performance with that by Daniil Trifonov’s, made on his 2013 Carnegie Hall recital recording on DG. The acoustic from Trifonov’s recording is drier, and unlike Cernadas’ recording, doesn’t provide the same dynamic range. Trifonov’s ability in the Presto nevertheless is impressive in its fleeting character, with some outbursts with dynamics. I know of Trifonov to be a highly technical player. Although he gets through the music nearly twenty seconds faster, Cernadas is willing to provide the space to make more of Scriabin’s gestures; the result for me was that under Trifonov, the piece ends unexpectedly; under Cernadas we get a little advanced notice when the piece does end. Both are beautiful, highly technical performances, but ultimately I preferred Cernadas’ interpretation.
Also included on this album are two short pieces (op. 57), from 1908, titled Désir and Caresse Dansée. The liner notes speak to the import of these pieces in highlighting Scriabin’s change in style. In both cases, I’d suggest that the composer is thinking how to connect two harmonies; in the first, we start with something mysterious, and leave things in the same way; whereas in the second piece starts the same way, but ends in a satisfying resolution of a triad. While the composer’s style does change, going into more interesting harmonic (and colorful) places, it’s hard not to acknowledge the importance of harmony in the way he wrote. Melodic elements come and go, but above all, I’d say in my getting to know this composer, how central harmony was to his style.
Equally short is the op. 58, Feuillet d’Album. This piece for me is different; it starts with another unsettled harmonic component and never resolves. Composer and performer allow us the space to appreciate the harmony; there’s not much else going on! I did listen to Garrick Ohlsson’s rendition on Hyperion, and while I really liked how they captured the sound of his piano in that recording, I found the imprint on me of this short meditation equally enjoyable as the one presented by Cernadas.
Final Thoughts
My journey with Scriabin’s music has been an interesting sojourn, in both getting to know the composer and his music, alongside my appreciation for Nuno Cernadas’ gifts as a pianist. I certainly learned in this journey, growing in appreciation of a composer I had very little knowledge of before starting this review. One of my take aways is how difficult this music is to perform, but also which levers are left to the performer to tailor to their taste and strengths.
I also made comments about the sound quality of this recording, which for me was good, supporting the style of this music but also highlighting the performer’s ability with control over dynamics. This makes a difference in how much we get to enjoy recordings and thankfully here I think the result speaks well for the artistic vision for this production.
As with many recordings, one recording may not tower over others, and with any “complete” recording, there may be other performances worth seeking out. This one is no different. But in this case Cernadas, for me, maintained a strong level of playing that is good as those put out earlier by better-known, established pianists. Which I mean as a compliment! He holds his own.
It was clear to me, from the pianist’s own liner notes, to his care in detail at the keyboard, with how he ensures that the melodic material in Scriabin’s colored tone painting is made clear to us, that he likes this music. To choose to record the composer’s complete sonatas as a debut I know had to be a challenging proposition, but he does well to not only well-represent the composer’s gifts, but his own as an interpreter.
I can say without reservation that I welcome opportunities in the future to hear Cernadas again, playing material with which I am more familiar, say, Haydn, Mozart, maybe even some Bach on the piano. This album, however, is about a composer who, I will agree with his notes, extended the power of the piano with expressive capacity. And Cernadas rose to this challenge, to realize the composer’s vision.
I’d encourage you to do as I did, and live with some of these pieces, alone, rather than hitting play and letting the whole album unfold. Like any piece of music, they become more familiar with repeated listens, and it forced me to think of the novelty of his harmonic language, with its power to pose some rather powerful, colorful ideas that I’d like to think echo the societal and artistic changes the composer and those around him experienced leading into the twentieth century. In the longer works, there is often a journey; in the shorter ones, my analogy might be that you took a swig of a cocktail that you want to savor, even if it is only a sip.