Re: Listening to Julius Asal

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 23:45:48 +0000, PPeso wrote:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).

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So what's your point? That someone can play both Scrtchabin
and Scratchlatti? HJ Lim, Katsaris, Pogo and Treif all do,
and probably others.