Listening to Julius Asal

Julius Asal is a promising new addition to the DG/UMG roster of young pianists. His rather remarkable cd debut was a Prokofiev album (IBS 12022) recorded in Granada in May 2021 in the midst of the pandemic. It certainly caught my attention. It included the 4 Piano Pieces Op.4 (with an excellent Suggestion Diabolique) and the 3 Pensées Op.62 sandwiching the Romeo and Juliet ballet, not only the 10 Piano Pieces Op.75 arranged for piano by Prokofiev but also transcriptions by Asal himself of the other numbers from the original ballet Op.64, with appropriately fierce renderings of the Quarrel and the Revenge and Fight scenes.
After such an auspicious beginning came the contract with Deutsche Grammophon. I expected he would choose to cover similar grounds for his big-label debut, say Bartok or Shostakovich. So it was quite a surprise that in 2023 he chose instead the combo Scriabin-Scarlatti.
While unified in their love of miniatures, this is not the most obvious coupling. On the one hand the nepo baby Scarlatti, with one foot in the Baroque and the other foot in the Classicism, all crystalline textures and Spanish rhythms. On the other hand the synesthetic Scriabin, starting from Chopin and moving over time vers la flamme toward his own version of mystical Gesamtkunstwerk. While most pianists have in their repertoire a few bits here and there by these two authors - great appetizers to start off a concert or perfect encores - arguably there is only one top-rated pianist who has successfully explored both of them in detail and depth, and this is Horowitz. Great Scriabin interpreters like Sofronitzky and Richter have avoided Scarlatti like the plague, and on the other end committed Scarlattists like Michelangeli have shown zero interest in Scriabin. So, for Asal to start off his DG career with this pair of composers was intriguing but not riskfree, and in fact a few reviewers have been lukewarm, substantially welcoming his debut recording with a shrug.
Quite unfair. While on balance less successful than his Prokofiev reading, the Scriabin-Scarlatti album is definitely worth considering. To make the concept works, Asal chooses the most compatible dimensions of the two composers, sampling their most melancholic and introspective aspects (quite a surprise in light of the aforementioned meteoric Prokofiev). For Scarlatti this means the masterful K87 in b (recorded by Horowitz both in 1935 and fifty years later), or the K466 in f, recorded by Horowitz in his wonderful collection of 1964 and recently revisited by, say, Grosvenor in 2008 and - yes! - Yuja Wang in 2010. Especially successful is the contrapuntal K58 in c. Makes one think about what Asal could do with the first book of JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (if he goes there my bet this will be among the most interesting 21st century WTCs since HJ Lim).
About Scriabin, Asal mostly goes for the gentle, intimate, late-romantic pre-1904 Scriabin of the Preludes Op.8, Op.11 and Op.16. In other words, don't expect the Scriabin-as-a-prophet as in Sofronitzky (and Richter, and Sokolov), nor the demonically-possessed-Scriabin as (often) in Horowitz. If anything, Asal reminds me of Bashkirov in this repertoire. The core of the album is the 1892 Sonata No.1 in f Op.6, possibly the most overlooked among the ten sonatas. Asal plays it in its entirety, and also bookends the album with two short excerpts ("Quasi niente") from the haunting IV movement.
There is an excellent pairing of Scarlatti's K544 in B flat and Scriabin's Prelude in e flat Op.16 No.4, with Asal acting as master somelier choosing the right wine to go with the food. And there are also a couple of prelude-like ruminative "transitions" originally improvised by Asal himself. Why? Just because. If there is a problem with the whole approach is a certain lack of textural variety, or – to put it plainly – some degree of sameness.  Lovely recorded by the DG team (the executive producer is Christian Badzura, same as for Vikingur Olafsson’s recent albums).