Over the course of the 1990s, the Scottish pianist Gordon Fergus-Thompson recorded five albums of Scriabin on the ASV label. Long unavailable, they are compiled and reissued here for the first time complete with original booklet essays by Bryce Morrison. Interviewed in 1995, at roughly the halfway point of the series, Fergus-Thompson remarked that he found an essential continuity in Scriabins language. Theres a special sort of logic in the progress from the First to the Tenth Sonata. Scriabin was a new, entirely original kind of composer/pianist and even in his earliest works his flightiness and volatility are paramount. Its an extraordinary experience playing and recording this music, alternately exhilarating and unnerving. Renowned both for his Debussy and his Rachmaninov, Fergus-Thompson is thus ideally equipped to elucidate the transient, haunted world of Scriabin. His playing strikes a balance between precision and spontaneity, between intellect and emotion. He faithfully mirrors the development of Scriabins style as it departs from the sideways romance of the Op. 3 Mazurkas and becomes increasingly fragmented, full of tensions abruptly set up and terminated. At the point where the series itself was terminated in 2001, Fergus-Thompson had recorded the complete Etudes, Preludes and many other shorter pieces as well as six of the ten sonatas (Nos. 2-5, 9 and 10). Throughout the series, critics noted his refined tonal elegance, fully conveyed by the spacious and detailed ASV recording, and his innate feeling for Scriabins superfine intricacy and exotically perfumed harmonies in the later music.
