Celebrating Franck and Scriabin

I couldn't resist this given my love of Scriabin's piano music, which is so well performed here by Latvian born pianist Naum Grubert (1951)... That he would combine on the same album two such divergent composers (Franck and Scriabin) intrigued me. What was he up to?

Well, what he was up to is making music!

...Two highly different composers whose works nevertheless find a synergistic crossing of paths in these performances by Grubert. This is a very engaging album and if you have any affinity for solo piano, I recommend you spend time with this album. You will be rewarded.

Naum Grubert, a pianist of a special signature who, in my experience, has excelled for years in immediately convincing characterization, color hue, expressiveness, analytical transparency and pianistic refinement. A musician who also knows how to give the impression of the creative origin sur place, so cleverly stylized that the music seems to have just been discovered, but inwardly considered down to the smallest detail, but outwardly almost intuitive. On the one hand the lyricism that is accompanied by the most subtle color shifts, on the other hand the finely graduated degrees of strength that function as expectation, construction, eruption and solution within this noble sound image. I wrote it before: not calculating, not looking for one's own limits, but discovering those of the music itself and presenting it to the listener as new. Grubert's highest trump cards are played out in the works of Scriabin, with one of the absolute highlights being the Third Sonata, whose corner movements evoke an apparently almost self-creating drama in his hands. Does that make Francks Prélude, Choral et Fugue less by definition? Certainly not, because under Grubert's hands, the work is rightly closer to Liszt than you might think.

Grubert plays this introverted masterpiece, with pastoral care and the improbably beautiful sound that captivates you without vulgar seduction skills. He knows what's going on: his fascinating analysis in the program booklet is as long as the play. In the poco allegro, foreland of the fugue, there is light and core in the dissolving poetic notes until their disappearance. Remember: this isn't soft music, it's music that harnesses a post-secondary energy as powerfully as possible. The triplefortes in the lock are so strong because they still have mental reserves. Behind that is calculation, the analytical rigor that, at this level of musicality, does not drop the mind but elevates it. Grubert's concentrated intimacy in the andante of Skriabin's Third Sonata proves the untenability of the separation between feeling and reason. Therein lies perhaps the essence of this late-romantic keyboard art, a profoundly intellectual journey to an architecturally justifiable state of rapture, protected by the power of the mind.

The new album by his mentor Naum Grubert from his time studying in the Netherlands. I would like everyone to listen to it!!