Scriabin: Symphony No. 1 & The Poem of Ecstasy

In the 1990s, Mikhail Pletnev and his Russian National Orchestra emerged as champions of a new kind of Russian musicmaking. Together, they united the raw passion of the great Soviet ensembles with a freshness and polish that was wholly new. Their sound has deepened and ripened with time, but this all-Scriabin program from 2015 shows their playing still every bit as authentic, and as alluring. They perform the youthful First Symphony with sweeping assurance and conviction, crowned with radiant choral singing and two gloriously idiomatic soloists in the Symphony’s closing hymn to art. And then we’re on to Scriabin at his delirious, visionary height. They play The Poem of Ecstasy as if it really could change the world: a performance that both thrills and seduces.