Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
Symphony No 2 in C minor, Op 29 (1902)
Brussels Philharmonic/Kazushi Ono
rec. 2023, Studio 4, Flagey, Belgium
Evil Penguin EPRC0061 [45]

A composer writes music.  A musician performs it.  Each, we hope, performs their role well.  However, no matter how inspired the composer or skilled the musician, neither is necessarily the best person to “explain” a score in spoken or written words.  Indeed, some of their meandering philosophical musings have been so tortuously – and often pretentiously – unintelligible as to be prime candidates for inclusion in Private Eye magazine’s popular feature Pseuds’ corner.  

When it comes to musicians verging, for some of us, alarmingly close to outright incomprehensibility, the most obvious recent example is the conductor Sergiu Celibidache.  Apparently influenced by the somewhat esoteric Japanese concept of ichi-go ichi-e, he proclaimed that individual concert performances were unique sonic occasions, incapable, by their very nature, of subsequent reproduction even when recorded to the highest technical standard and with the greatest fidelity.  Regrettably, his recorded legacy is thus much sparser than might otherwise have been the case. 

When, on the other hand, we turn our attention to composers, the prime example could well be Alexander Scriabin.  This new release’s booklet essay, written by Nuno Cernadas, gives a useful indication of how the composer came to see the role of music and the Arts in general and quotes his contention that “music receives meaning and significance when it is a link in a single, unified plan, within an entire world view… Music is a path of revelation”.  

In case you’re left somewhat bemused by that thought, Mr Cernadas helpfully expands the point and thereby demonstrates the problems that even musically knowledgeable laymen may experience in trying to get to grips with the composer’s preoccupations.  “Scriabin’s philosophy[‘s]… central ingredients”, he writes, “were monomania, megalomania and mysticism, in the sense that the power of the mind is unlimited and all worldly manifestations are either subject to its control or even created by it… Scriabin progressively adopted a messianic attitude towards Art, believing his music was capable of pushing humanity over its existential threshold to a higher dimension…”  Of the ultimate manifestation of Scriabin’s artistic philosophy, the unfinished Mysterium (review, review), Mr Cernadas observes that “this envisioned opus of cataclysmic repercussions, would be an all-encompassing… ritual, blending music, dance, caresses, colours and perfumes, in order to arouse and elevate the five senses… [A]ctive participants… by entering a state of ecstatic bliss, would provoke the dematerialisation of all things and their fusion into the Theosophical ‘Universal One’”.

By this point, you’ll perhaps be coming to appreciate that, when compared to such contemporary Russian symphonists as Glazunov (b. 1865), Kallinikov (b. 1866) and Rachmaninoff (b. 1873), Scriabin is something of an artistic outlier, if not a definite aberration.  You may well be relieved, therefore, to learn that his second symphony was composed at the end of what musicologists now identify as the first period of his career, which was its most conventional and least mystical.  Moreover, unlike the more ambitious first symphony (1900) that had incorporated vocal soloists and a chorus and run to six movements, the second confines itself to purely orchestral forces deployed over a span of five.  

I have added several CD performances to my collection over the years.  Two are vintage Soviet productions.  The first, dating from 1950, comes from the Great Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio and Central TV/Nikolay Golovanov (Music Boheme CDBMR 907082), while the second was recorded in 1963 by the USSR Symphony Orchestra/Evgeni Svetlanov (Regis RRC 1129).  Both are absolutely choc-full of character, with the characteristically garish Soviet-style brass – an admittedly acquired taste – making it impossible to confuse them with any of their western European rivals.  I also have two Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra recordings.  The first, conducted by Eliahu Inbal in 1978 (Philips Classics 454 271-2), remains an impressive account that has worn very well indeed.  The second, dating from 15 years later, is idiomatically led by Dmitry Kitaenko (RCA Classics 74321 20297 2).  My final disc is the much-admired 1989 account from the Philadelphia Orchestra/Riccardo Muti (Brilliant Classics 92744).  The Golovanov and Svetlanov discs are stand-alone releases.  On the other hand, the Inbal, Muti and Kitaenko discs are, at least in their incarnations that I possess, integral parts of complete sets, each of which includes Scriabin’s three numbered symphonies plus an extra item or two – the Poème de l’extase (Inbal, Muti and Kitaenko), Prométhée, le poème de feu (Muti and Kitaenko), the piano concerto op.20 (Kitaenko) and Réverie op.24 (Kitaenko).

Apart from the five recordings that I’ve already mentioned, there have been a number of others over the years, several of which have been reviewed by my colleagues and may be worth your attention.  Leif Segerstam and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra recorded the work for BIS in 1991, to be followed four years later by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (review, review).  The past decade has seen something of a revival of interest with recordings from Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra (review, review, review), Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (review, review) and Dmitry Kitaenko with, this time, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln. 

The very latest account of the symphony now arrives from the Brussels Philharmonic.  That’s an orchestra that will presumably feel entirely at home with Scriabin.  On the one hand we have a composer who considered music to be primarily “a path of revelation” on that “single, unified plan, within an entire world view”.  On the other we have an orchestra that declares online its “rock-solid belief in the need for cross-fertilisation between art, life and society” and proclaims – with, we must assume, a straight face, that “The world needs symphonic music. And symphonic music needs the world.”  One can only conclude that, if Theosophical belief encompasses an afterlife, the match between Scriabin and the Brussels Philharmonic must be one made in heaven… 

On this occasion the orchestra is conducted by Kazushi Ono, its music director since 2022.  The Scriabin disc is their first recording together and hence something of a calling card.  I imagine, therefore, that the repertoire would have been very carefully chosen to play to the new team’s strengths.  I had not encountered Mr Ono before and was intrigued to see that his own website describes him as “the definitive musical citizen of the world”.  Theresa May’s contrary assertion that “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere” may have played well to Brexiteers but is pretty untenable when it comes to classical music and I looked forward with some anticipation to hearing what Mr Ono – Japanese-born, Munich-trained and conducting a Belgian orchestra in Russian music – was going to bring to the table.  In fact, from a purely interpretative point of view, there’s nothing really idiosyncratic about his account apart from an unusually brisk take on the opening andante first movement.  Of course, literal timings convey only the crudest impressions.  They can, moreover, when delivered by accomplished conductors, be completely irrelevant to the musical impressions that individual listeners subjectively experience.  Nevertheless, they remain broadly useful as an initial broad-brush analytical tool, if only to indicate at a glance any particularly significant aberrations from conventional performance practice.  

However, even if Ono’s account is not especially remarkable from an interpretative point of view, it still has more than a few points in its favour.  In the first place, the orchestral playing is impressive, right from the very beginning of the piece where, in the carefully laid out introduction, you sense that the orchestra is following the conductor with the intensity of a chamber performance.  The quality of the playing is, indeed, a point worth stressing, because if you enter the words “Brussels Philharmonic” into the MusicWeb Google search engine you’ll find that our reviewers’ general past consensus has been that it is a very good regional orchestra but maybe a little out of its league when competing with the biggest international rivals (though my colleague Brian Reinhart rather intriguingly refers to an online discussion board’s blind test of 32 versions of Debussy’s La mer in which Brussels apparently trumped some far more famous names).  While it’s tempting to imagine, on the basis of this debut disc, that Mr Ono’s definitive musical world-citizenship has worked some sort of magical transformation, it’s actually far more likely that he is simply proving to be a very effective orchestra builder who’s been able to bring out the best in his players.  Indeed, in a very brief Brussels Philharmonic YouTube clip (“Welcome Kazushi Ono”) he may be heard utilising that very same construction metaphor when he proclaims that “My aim is [to] construct the Brussels Philharmonic like [a] cathedral or even higher than Brussels’s cathedrals”.

Fortunately, Mr Ono’s enjoyably delivered performance has been well recorded in warm, rich, full-bodied sound that suits the repertoire well.  For confirmation, I refer you to a trailer posted on YouTube by the disc’s producers that offers a very brief but effective illustration of the orchestra’s impressive orchestral sonority.  At the same time, Ono skilfully balances his forces so that plenty of felicitous fine detail can be heard and appreciated.  In the unlikely case that you’ve only ever encountered the Golovanov or Svetlanov recordings before, plenty of what you hear here will come as something of a surprise.

If we exclude recordings of this symphony that are only available as parts of larger collections and concentrate instead on stand-alone accounts, this new disc takes its place as a strong recommendation in a somewhat sparse field.  My only reservation is that, given the quality of the performance of the symphony, it’s something of a shame that the opportunity wasn’t taken to record something else.  With a playing time of just over 45 minutes, this is undeniably an under-filled disc and that point may prove significant for some when weighing it against its competitors.

Nevertheless, if you decide that their inferior sound quality rules the more characterful Golovanov or Svetlanov accounts out of court, this excellently executed new recording might well be the one for you.

Rob Maynard

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