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Russian pianist Evgeny Zarafiants seems to have grasped fully the extent to which Alexander Scriabin's early sets of piano preludes hover in the aura of Fr
d
ric Chopin's piano music. Scriabin's 24 Preludes, Op. 11, are only the most obvious homage to Chopin's compositional aesthetic. Zarafiants fashions the Scriabin of these early preludes neither as an inflated Romantic nor as an edgy modernist, but as a man on the cusp, finding inspiration much as Chopin did-by looking back. Hence, Zarafiants' performances have a loving legato in the foreground while maintaining rhythmic and metric crispness. His use of the sustaining pedal is sparing, and he refrains from a kind of interpretative quirkiness too often heard in Scriabin performances. A most enjoyable recording.
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