September 23, 2005
My season starts with rare chance to hear Scriabin
For me, the new musical season starts this weekend with Russian piano music, in particular that of Alexander Scriabin.
Pianist Koji Attwood plays the Fifth and Tenth sonatas, as well as some smaller works, by Scriabin on a program that features rarely heard music by three other Russians: Anatol Liadov, Felix Blumenfeld and Sergei Bortkiweicz. It will be well worth hearing these pieces, if only for their novelty and the great heritage of Russian pianism their composers represent, but I'll be paying extra attention to the Scriabin.
As I write, I'm listening to the Poème de l'extase, Op. 54, his single-movement Fourth Symphony, composed in 1908, the year after the Fifth Sonata. It's not as forward-looking as the piano music he was writing about this time; it has a lot of affinities with Debussy as far as its restless tone center and chordal language (a reminder that Debussy toured Russia as a member of a piano trio funded by Tchaikovsky's patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, while Scriabin was a boy — perhaps there's some Ur-source common to Debussy and Scriabin few of us know about).
I also took time tonight to play through some of the easier Scriabin etudes and preludes, and it's fascinating to watch as Scriabin's music makes a change from conservative Romanticism to something very experimental, and virtually atonal. Scriabin's life was prematurely shortened by blood poisoning, but it seems quite likely that he would have gone as far as the other progressive composers of his day had he lived past 43 (he died in 1915).
The funny thing is that even as his music grew more daring, you can still hear the roots of his aesthetic, and in his case it's Frederic Chopin. The textures of the earlier pieces are clearly based on Chopin's technical approaches, especially the way the Polish master breaks up chord figurations.
And in a piece like the Prelude, Op. 74, No. 2, written in 1914, amid all the slippery chromaticism the left hand is playing a chord sequence inspired by Chopin's A minor Prelude (Op. 28, No. 2), written in 1839. Scriabin's compositional approaches haven't been studied as thoroughly as they ought to be, it seems to me, but students familiar with Chopin could get a lot out of it — the Russian composer built many of his cloud castles on some familiar masonry.
In any event, here's your chance to hear some of this unusual music performed live. Attwood plays at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Steinway Piano Gallery in Boca Raton. For more information, call Piano Lovers at (561) 929-6633 or pianopeople@aol.com.
In other news: The Renaissance Chamber Orchestra wraps up its Summer in the City series on Thursday night at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. Music of Bach, Vivaldi, Ernst Bloch and Sir Edward Elgar are on the program for the RCO, a 13-member string ensemble.
The group also has a hefty concert series planned for the season, and I'll discuss that at in a couple weeks. For more information, call (786) 42-MUSIC or write to info@RCO-USA.org.
And once more: We're watching again in horror as a giant storm closes in on the Gulf Coast. I'll have more to say about disasters and artists' responses to them in an upcoming post. For now, it's another time to stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings.
