Music : Taub Explores Works by Scriabin at USC

The ever-enterprising Robert Taub, who recently released his new recorded cycle of the Scriabin piano sonatas, delivered a sampler from the cycle before a small but attentive audience at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC Saturday night.

It was one of those rare programs that try to make a chronological point, tracing Scriabin’s wild evolution from Chopin adulator (in the Sonata No. 2 and the Opus 27 Preludes) to freewheeling 20th-Century mystic (in the Sonatas Nos. 7 and 9).

And Taub emphasized the point as he went along, linking the late sonatas solidly to this century in clear, direct, nervously propelled terms, highlighting the volatile dissonances. Extending the linkage further, Taub interrupted Scriabin’s furies with a pair of knotty contemporary works by Seymour Shifrin (“Responses”) and Milton Babbitt (“Emblems,” a Los Angeles premiere).

To these ears, Babbitt’s arhythmic kaleidoscope of sound--much of which takes place at the extremes of the keyboard--was more interesting than Shifrin’s equally jagged but less coherent work. Yet Taub plunged through both with fearless clarity, overcoming some glaring resonances from the Yamaha piano.