Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Scriabin's piano music moves from Chopin-inflected late Romanticism into a highly personal, dissonant language of poems, preludes and sonatas, culminating in works such as Vers la flamme and the White Mass Sonata.
His early études, preludes and sonatas sit close to Chopin in genre and harmony, yet already favour extended dominant colours. Mid-period works such as the Fourth and Fifth Sonatas and The Poem of Ecstasy push chromaticism until tonal anchors thin out. The later sonatas drop key signatures altogether; texture and harmonic colour carry the argument, often built on fourth-based chords and related scales. Orchestral scores are few but large in ambition, among them Prometheus with its part for coloured light. The music aims at radiance and ecstasy rather than narrative drama.
Compositions by Alexander Scriabin appear on
Tensile Flame
Michael Kieran Harvey’s two-disc piano programme pairs Liszt’s B minor Sonata and its early twentieth-century echoes in Skryabin, Rachmaninov and Ravel with a second disc of Stravinsky, Carter, Graham Hair and Carl Vine’s 1990 Piano Sonata.
Mistika
Composer and keyboardist Linda Ceff sets past and present inspirations beside her own contemporary works. Homages to Stravinsky, Messiaen and Skryabin sit with multi-tracked piano, synthesised colour, bells and Asian-inflected writing.
Sparkling Keys
Sparkling Keys celebrates the creative partnership of the National Trust and the Team of Pianists. Over a decade that partnership produced Twilight Chamber Music at Rippon Lea and concerts at Como, Labassa, Illawarra and Barwon Park.