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From: DeepBlue <dan.koren@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical.recordings
Subject: Re: Listening to Julius Asal
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2024 10:20:26 +0000
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On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 2:23:21 +0000, DeepBlue wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 23:45:48 +0000, PPeso wrote:
>
>> Julius Asal is a promising new addition to the DG/UMG roster of young
>> pianists. His rather remarkable cd debut was a Prokofiev album (IBS
>> 12022) recorded in Granada in May 2021 in the midst of the pandemic. It
>> certainly caught my attention. It included the 4 Piano Pieces Op.4 (with
>> an excellent Suggestion Diabolique) and the 3 Pensées Op.62 sandwiching
>> the Romeo and Juliet ballet, not only the 10 Piano Pieces Op.75 arranged
>> for piano by Prokofiev but also transcriptions by Asal himself of the
>> other numbers from the original ballet Op.64, with appropriately fierce
>> renderings of the Quarrel and the Revenge and Fight scenes.
>>
>> After such an auspicious beginning came the contract with Deutsche
>> Grammophon. I expected he would choose to cover similar grounds for his
>> big-label debut, say Bartok or Shostakovich. So it was quite a surprise
>> that in 2023 he chose instead the combo Scriabin-Scarlatti.
>>
>> While unified in their love of miniatures, this is not the most obvious
>> coupling. On the one hand the nepo baby Scarlatti, with one foot in the
>> Baroque and the other foot in the Classicism, all crystalline textures
>> and Spanish rhythms. On the other hand the synesthetic Scriabin,
>> starting from Chopin and moving over time vers la flamme toward his own
>> version of mystical Gesamtkunstwerk. While most pianists have in their
>> repertoire a few bits here and there by these two authors - great
>> appetizers to start off a concert or perfect encores - arguably there is
>> only one top-rated pianist who has successfully explored both of them in
>> detail and depth, and this is Horowitz. Great Scriabin interpreters like
>> Sofronitzky and Richter have avoided Scarlatti like the plague, and on
>> the other end committed Scarlattists like Michelangeli have shown zero
>> interest in Scriabin. So, for Asal to start off his DG career with this
>> pair of composers was intriguing but not riskfree, and in fact a few
>> reviewers have been lukewarm, substantially welcoming his debut
>> recording with a shrug.
>>
>> Quite unfair. While on balance less successful than his Prokofiev
>> reading, the Scriabin-Scarlatti album is definitely worth considering.
>> To make the concept works, Asal chooses the most compatible dimensions
>> of the two composers, sampling their most melancholic and introspective
>> aspects (quite a surprise in light of the aforementioned meteoric
>> Prokofiev). For Scarlatti this means the masterful K87 in b (recorded by
>> Horowitz both in 1935 and fifty years later), or the K466 in f, recorded
>> by Horowitz in his wonderful collection of 1964 and recently revisited
>> by, say, Grosvenor in 2008 and - yes! - Yuja Wang in 2010. Especially
>> successful is the contrapuntal K58 in c. Makes one think about what Asal
>> could do with the first book of JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (if he
>> goes there my bet this will be among the most interesting 21st century
>> WTCs since HJ Lim).
>>
>> About Scriabin, Asal mostly goes for the gentle, intimate, late-romantic
>> pre-1904 Scriabin of the Preludes Op.8, Op.11 and Op.16. In other words,
>> don't expect the Scriabin-as-a-prophet as in Sofronitzky (and Richter,
>> and Sokolov), nor the demonically-possessed-Scriabin as (often) in
>> Horowitz. If anything, Asal reminds me of Bashkirov in this repertoire.
>> The core of the album is the 1892 Sonata No.1 in f Op.6, possibly the
>> most overlooked among the ten sonatas. Asal plays it in its entirety,
>> and also bookends the album with two short excerpts ("Quasi niente")
>> from the haunting IV movement.
>>
>> There is an excellent pairing of Scarlatti's K544 in B flat and
>> Scriabin's Prelude in e flat Op.16 No.4, with Asal acting as master
>> somelier choosing the right wine to go with the food. And there are also
>> a couple of prelude-like ruminative "transitions" originally improvised
>> by Asal himself. Why? Just because. If there is a problem with the whole
>> approach is a certain lack of textural variety, or – to put it plainly –
>> some degree of sameness.  Lovely recorded by the DG team (the executive
>> producer is Christian Badzura, same as for Vikingur Olafsson’s recent
>> albums).
>
> So what's your point? That someone can play both Scrtchabin
> and Scratchlatti? HJ Lim, Katsaris, Pogo and Treif all do,
> and probably others.

This is actually pretty good:

Asal Julius (Germany) Final round PALMA D'ORO 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJzaOjyFL3Q

More revelatory about the kid's musical abilities
than the Scrtchabin and the Scratchlatti

Cheers!