Customer Reviews

Scriabin Etudes Complete

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As I often do, I searched Amazon for a recording of the Scriabin Etudes. I wanted to find the best available interpretations and recording possible. I knew about the Piers Lane and Alexander Paley recordings of this work, but this Chitose Okashiro CD proved a remarkable surprise! After listening to clips of both Lane and Okashiro playing the etudes, I made up my mind to purchase this CD. Wow!

Okashiro is an extremely competent virtuoso, yet she uses her pianistic skills to serve Scriabin's music. As the outstanding liner notes point out, Okashiro employs her extensive ear-training and aural abilities to play with extreme sensitivity and musicality.

Each study presents the player with technical and musical hurdles. Okashiro not only clears each hurdle with ease. She makes music out of each etude.

The Opus 8 etudes owe a debt to Frederic Chopin. Many of the same figurations and gestures are present, yet Scriabin's unique rhythmic, melodic and harmonic traits are audible. In sensitive sections, Okashiro plays with great beauty and sensitivity. She shapes each phrase beautifully and gives it forward direction. Okashiro's left-hand playing is strong and foundational, important for playing the unusual tremolos Scriabin uses. Her right-hand playing is quick, dexterous, and extremely accurate. Okashiro will wow you with her technique and accuracy!

My personal favorite on the CD is Opus 8, No. 10., in D-flat Major. It sounds like a cross between Balakirev's "Islamey" and a Chopin mazurka. It employs flurries of thirds and a meter in five. The D-flat Major etude is a whirlwind piece with some bewitching harmonies! It is perhaps the most self-consciously virtuosic of all the Scriabin etudes, and Okashiro slam-dunks it.

Okashiro uses a different approach for the latter etudes. Scriabin obviously used material from his Fourth Sonata in several of the etudes, and Okashiro's playing matches the fine Roberto Szidon recording of the Fourth Sonata. It is bleak, languid, hazy, misty and other-worldly.

Another impressive effort is Opus 65, No. 1. This etude shares the musical language of the dreaded Sixth Sonata. It has wicked runs of a major ninth (Stretch your thumb and little finger as far as you can on the piano, and try to play fast runs!). Okashiro plays with jaw-dropping virtuosity, and she keeps the etude appropriately frenetic.

If you want to own a great set of interpretations of the Scriabin Etudes with superb sound, purchase this one by Chitose Okashiro. Do not be scared off by her obscure-sounding Japanese name. Okashiro plays Scriabin as well as anybody I have heard (I have listened to the complete Scriabin sonata cycles by Szidon and Ashkenazy, including clips from Sofronitsky, Ogdon, Hamelin, and Laredo). Go for it!!

This is an exceptional CD. Okashiro is a pianist of amazing abilities. While listening to her performance of these etudes, I was immediately struck by her considerable technical command and her acute musical sensitivities. Her stylistic freedom, enviable control of inner voices, and incredibly seductive tone colors have engaged me into an almost indescribable, mystical experience. The performance of each etude is so well thought out and executed that I can well understand why she is being compared to the great Russian Scriabin interpreters. In fact, my first reaction was that Okashiro must have known Scriabin. I feel this is an important CD for every pianist to own.

Okashiro's performance of the Scriabin's studies is fabulous. I've ever heard some of this studies with Horowitz, but I've never seen ALL of then. This album is very good because this is complete. Of course, Okashiro is very good! I used to hear Horowitz and I like her (Okashiro) a lot. A comparission is not the case, of course, but was an excelent buy. The sound's quality is powerfull and professional too. Very good, one of my favorites.

I don't know... Maybe it's just me... But I find her rubatos very heavy, and a bit "over the top". It's like the way that you were first tempted, as a child, to play Chopin. But if you were lucky, your piano teacher discouraged it. And apparently someone forgot to tell Okashiro that these are Etudes and NOT Nocturnes. Her tempos are almost uniformly too slow. However, the sound quality of this CD is excellent. The best recording of the complete Scriabin Etudes, in my opinion, is the Piers Lane CD.

It is not enough for a pianist to simply produce beautiful sounds and beautiful rubato in order to play Scriabin effectively. Chitose Okashiro possesses the above-mentioned qualities - a fine tone and sense of color -but in Scriabin, the music must always serve the composer's vision, that is, the pianist must be completely at one with this composer's idiomatic style. Chitose Oshakiro doesn't seem to absorb that particularly feverish and strangely poetic atmosphere specific to Scriabin's sound world. It is not apparent that she has absorbed any of Scriabin's writings or recordings, but seems rather to follow a vaguely manneristic style of execution.In other words, there is a lack of imaginative effort and deep identification with the composer's aesthetics and spiritual world. And to think of all the people who are going to think that this recording is what Scriabin is all about...