In Poems & Fairy Tales, pianist Irina Feoktistova performs solo piano works by Russian composers Nicolai Medtner and Aleksandr Scriabin.   A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Feoktistova has also toured extensively in Europe and America.  She has collaborated with many musicians performing a wide variety of music, playing for musical theatre productions, acting as rehearsal pianist for operas, and joining contemporary music ensembles.  Currently a resident of Chicago, Feoktistova maintains her Russian roots and released a CD entitled Musical Bridge, Chicago-St. Petersburg, in 2005.

It is a logical pairing of composers for a solo piano recording; in many ways Medtner and Scriabin represent different sides of the same artistic coin.  Nicolai Medtner (1880-1951) is about as Apollonian as a late-Romantic-era Russian composer can be; he wrote almost exclusively for the piano, and while his music embraces complex harmonies and even radically violent gestures, it maintains a classical sense of organization and proportion.  Scriabin (1872-1915) on the other hand, represents the Dionysian, the irrational, and the egotistical.  He embraced all the fast-moving changes and fly-by-night philosophies of the early 20th century, tossed around on a storm surge which composers like Medtner largely rode out peacefully.  By the end of his life (cut short by blood poisoning), he had fashioned an artistic philosophy which explored the universal nature of creation, intertwined disparate genres of art, and seamlessly blended music with other sensory experiences.  To illustrate the contrast between these two composers, Medtner’s last work was a Piano Quintet in C, while Scriabin’s was an pan-artistic orgy which was intended to bring about the apocalypse (luckily for us he did not finish it).

While the idea to pair the composers on this CD is well intentioned, they are out of balance with each other and the combination seems awkward.  We start with a short piece by Medtner, 1 of his many Skazki (Fairy Tales), followed by the 13-minute Sonata-Reminiscenza.  Then we are done with Medtner and turn to Scriabin, whose portion of the recording is announced with the c# etude Op.2/1.  This is followed by 8 preludes excerpted from the 24 pieces of Op.11, here placed out of numeric order, and seemingly arranged only for a general fast-slow or loud-soft contrast.   These preludes are around a minute each, and so we move quickly to the d# etude, Op.8/12, which seems to break up the set of miniatures with a slightly more substantial form.  This is followed by another of the Op.11 preludes, isolated from its siblings for unknown reasons.  Another window of substantial music is the 2 Poems, Op.32, and the Poem Vers La Flamme, Op.72, each around 5 minutes long.  Between these 2 lies the Album Leaf, a 90-second piece which would have worked better as an encore track.  The problem with the CD is that the music is broken up nearly 1/3 Medtner and 2/3 Scriabin, yet we hear a large Medtner piece and no truly substantial Scriabin one.  Any number of the piano sonatas could have been used to counterbalance the Medtner sonata, and give the Scriabin portion more of a sense of purpose and less of a potpourri.

My complaints about the choice and organization of repertoire aside, what shines through the murky logic of the CD is Irina Feoktistova’s playing, which is masterful and at times revelatory.  None of these composers’ piano works are easy, but must be performed with a sense of ease and inevitability, either to support Medtner’s intricate classical forms or lend logic to Scriabin’s seemingly improvisatory declamations.   Feoktistova is completely at home in this music, and her knowledge of it and love for it are evident at every moment.
It is interesting to note how she approaches the composers in a similar manner, desiring to bring clarity and energy to their respective harmonic and rhythmic worlds.  In the Medtner sonata, which sounds slightly like intellectualized Rachmaninov, we are taken on the journey of ever more complex harmonic structures and never lose track of the overarching form.  An explosive moment at the halfway point is so much more effective because of the classical set-up Feoktistova builds from the 1st measure.   In the Scriabin preludes and études, the inner voices are heard clearly and the meticulous counterpoint becomes almost crystalline.  The tremolos toward the end of Vers La Flamme are what Scriabin most likely intended – blocks of sonic excitation, moments of trying to make the piano play like an orchestra.  The moods evoked in the pair of Poems, Op.32, balance perfectly, though the 1st magical piece is twice as long as the tormented, stormy 2nd.

If one could offer any criticism of Feoktistova’s conception or execution, it would be merely a mention that there is room for improvement in her treatment of Scriabin’s longer forms.  One often feels one’s attention being drawn to moments which are, in the larger scale, simply images seen while on the journey, rather than pit stops.  At times the organic growth of Scriabin’s stream of consciousness composition is stunted by a detail being accentuated a little too much, a moment being held a hair too long (or moved from a hair too soon).  The difficulty of understanding Scriabin’s music comes not only from its complexity, which demands clarification, but its heart-on-the-sleeve over-the-top-ness, which needs to be reined in a little in the longer forms, for the greater emotional effect of the whole.  I applaud Feoktistova for her virtuosity and vision, and hope in the future we can be treated to a deeper interpretation of these works, which she is in such a strong position to offer us.

© 2009 Patrick Valentino