Scriabin / Alexeev Mazurkas Poemes & Impromtus CD

This multi-album set of piano works by Scriabin is the fourth and final installment in Dmitri Alexeev's monumental endeavor to record Scriabin's entire oeuvre for the piano on Brilliant Classics, an eight-album collection that includes the earlier Complete Preludes, Complete etudes and Complete Piano Sonatas. This set gathers all the works that do not belong to the uniform cycles of the previous three releases, and the title captures three interesting trends in this huge range of opus numbers spanning 25 years, without being overly prescriptive. The Mazurkas represent a youthful devotion to Chopin that matured into lifelong inspiration; the many Poemes (whether or not they bear that specific title) are emblematic of the imagery and emotional and spiritual content with which the works are imbued; and the Impromptus evoke Scriabin's mold-breaking compositional freedom and the genius of his idiosyncratic stream of consciousness and individual pianism. There are other noteworthy genres here with an important place in his piano output, including sonata-form movements that ultimately would be stand-alone pieces, nocturnes, other dances, and a pair of album leaves. Many of these pieces provide this collection with valuable continuity, constituting bridges in the development of the composer's art and pianism between the individual sonatas, etudes and preludes that feature in the previous volumes. Or they provide context: for example, the three pieces of Opus 51 given here are the companions to the Prelude Op.51 No.2 that featured alone in the previous prelude cycle. As such they are not a "catch all" but a worthy and indispensable final piece of the puzzle depicting this extraordinary creator.