Xiayin Wang, Chinese-born but American-based, offers a Scriabin recital with a difference. Avoiding large-scale works (the sonatas), she takes us on a carefully planned journey offering a bird’s-eye view of the composer’s restless, meteoric career. An exception is provided by the Fantasy where Wang’s scintillating technique makes light of every virtuoso challenge and where her commitment makes you wonder why such starry, ultra-romantic poetry is not in the repertoire of many more pianists. Here, as Wang puts it in her excellent notes, Scriabin “abandons Chopinesque poise for abandonment”. Already a far cry from her curtain-raiser, two waltzes composed when Scriabin was 14 are clearly besotted with Chopin. The single Polonaise, too, while teetering on the edge of experimental horizons, is a fierce memory of Chopin and it is only when you arrive at the later works that you meet the composer’s more obsessive, opalescent and fragmented style. On the other hand, the Op 38 Waltz unites all aspects of Scriabin’s multifaceted genius, a magical and dazzling memory of Liszt’s Valses Oubliées.

Wang plays all this music with a special brilliance and refinement, and if you occasionally doubt her musical range in the darker regions of Scriabin’s personality, she comes up with a performance of Vers la flamme that moves superbly from a brooding menace to a final apocalyptic blaze. Finely recorded, Wang’s recital provides an unusually perceptive introduction to Scriabin’s piano music, and I now look forward to hearing her in a wide range of repertoire.

‘Chopin without the melodies’ someone wrote condescendingly about the early Scriabin. I think that is an unfair description. The valses are attractive and have an elegance of their own and the Polonaise, which he wrote when he was already 25, still has more than a flavour of Chopin, which should come as no surprise.

But then there was a watershed, which coincided with the turn of the century watershed in 1900. The Fantaisie, Op. 28 takes us to a different sound-world with harmonies that tell us that the Wagner bacillus had reached him. In the Poèmes Opp, 32, 34 and 36 from three years later he had gone one step further and created his own impressionism. The Poème tragique is honestly more stormy than tragic and the Satan that he portrays in Poème satanique is hardly the prevalent picture of him but rather a ‘Devil in disguise’.

With the Poèmes Opp. 41 and 52, though separated by some years, we find the ethereal Scriabin, floating about in an impressionist landscape filled with haze, mist and blurred contours. Finally we are at the end of the journey with Vers la flamme with its almost manic repetitive eruptions and the Deux danses with the same kind of intensity.

The young Xiayin Wang, who studied at the Shanghai Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music, is a dynamic interpreter, powerful but also able to relax without losing momentum, as for instance in the lyrical moments of the delicate Valse in A flat major, Op. 38. She has a wide palette of colours and the superb recording brings out the full scope of her playing admirably.

As sheer pianism this is a disc that requires to be heard by every lover of piano music. Scriabin lovers will find plenty to revel in and for the reader who is a newcomer to the music of this very special composer I can hardly imagine a better disc to gain insight into his world. From there one can then explore further his preludes, sonatas and other genres.

Wang manages to cut a diagonal path across Scriabin’s output, largely drawing from lesser known pieces, including the waltzes, poems, and pieces in genres he visited no more than once or a couple of times. These are often treated as afterthoughts by pianists in the course recording of comprehensive Scriabin packages, in several cases that’s all you’ll ever find of such works on disc. However, Wang treats each as a distinct and separate case, and she spins the neglected Polonaise in B flat minor, Op. 21, into gold, relating it to the Russian tradition of the polonaise with its darker hues and more lumbering, rhythmic profile. She finds what’s truly “satanic” about the Poème satanique, Op. 36, a work that often doesn’t get very good performances because its uncharacteristically bright, major-key sound seems at odds with the title; however, in Wang’s version it is clear that this piece comes from the dark side of Scriabin’s musical universe. Speaking of which, her rendition of Vers la flamme—a piece Wang often plays in recital and is included on her debut—is everything one would want it to be: muted and gradually emergent at the start, white hot and ecstatic at the end.

Some might comment, “so Wang has just managed to keep her standards up through her third disc; what’s exciting about that?” Wang maintains a very high standard, and this Naxos disc continues to manage her recording trajectory much as it was playing out already; nowhere does one get the sense that Wang is compromising in order to conform to Naxos’ usual requirements and get a recording made. That is a win-win situation for the label, for Wang, and most significantly the consumer, who will really benefit the most by virtue of this excellent disc.