Scriabin piano music

71tdcq35aal._ss500_ Russians Alexey Stanchinsky and Alexander Scriabin are featured on Darkness Illuminated, a new disc on the Ulysses Arts label by Uzbek pianist Nafis Umerkulova. Here she seeks to put the obscure Stanchinsky in the spotlight alongside his far more famous contemporary, Scriabin, and the album comprises works by both composers written over a 17-year time period from 1894/5 until 1912, allowing the listener to appreciate how each composer’s oeuvre developed over time while also comparing and contrasting their music.

Such was Stanchinsky’s artistic gift that many believed he was destined to follow in the footsteps of that other great Russian Romantic composer Rachmaninov (he studied with Taneyev, who also taught Rachmaninov). But with his premature death at the age of 26, and the turmoil of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet Regime, Stanchinsky fell into obscurity, and has since been thoroughly overshadowed by his more famous contemporary, Scriabin.

Both composers come from the great nineteenth-century European Romantic tradition, and the influence of Chopin is especially clear in their piano miniatures (one could easily mistake some of Stanchinsky’s Preludes and the Nocturne on this disc for Chopin). These are deeply lyrical, sensitive works, often introspective and intimate, and the later sets reveal more experimental writing, with forays into counterpoint, unexpected harmonies, modality and idioms drawn from Russian folk music. But perhaps the most striking work is the Piano Sonata in E-flat minor which opens this album. Cast in a single movement, with all the richness and virtuosity of Rachmaninov, it is a homage to Scriabin and shares many of the features of Scriabin’s piano sonatas with its fantasy-like structure, colourful harmonic palette and wide-ranging ideas, including a slow section in the major key which could be influenced by American folk music. It’s an impressive opening and Nafis gives this big-boned work full rein, allowing its myriad concepts to flow with a vibrant spontaneity.

Scriabin’s Preludes, Op 16 and 22, are wonderfully intricate, replete with Romantic elegance and lavish lyricism, each Prelude with its own distinctive character. Hints of experimentation are already present, especially in his use of harmony and dissonance to suggest specific moods, and his mastery of tension and release. By the time we reach the two Poems, Op 32, in the latter part of the album, his experimental approach to texture and harmonic shading is clear; these are works which look forward to the atonality of Schoenberg.

This is a most satisfying album which works rather in the manner of a recital disc, and Nafis makes a strong case for both composers in her highly accomplished playing, a spontaneity and freshness which really suits this music, and a rich, warm direct sound, combined with her evident affection for this music.

Recommended

‘Darkness Illuminated’ is released on the Ulysses Arts label

Meet the Artist interview with Nafis Umerkulova

artworks-000404027133-aju8pu-t500x500 James Kreiling, piano (Odradek)

The music of Alexander Scriabin inhabits a distinctive, personal soundworld which is hard to define. It is the music of excess, ecstasy, tumult and passion. It is excessive, overripe, decadent, heavily perfumed, languorous and frenzied, lacking in structure and sometimes downright bizarre. The music of extremes, it is “hyper everything”, and as such it defies description or categorization. Its language is complex, often atonal and frequently almost impenetrable. For some listeners, and artists too, it is this “over-the-top-ness” that is off-putting; for others, myself included, it is this sense of excess and rapture that is so compelling. His personal life and outlook mirrored the excesses of his music: he was dissolute, he could be outrageous, he had high-falutin’ ideas of his own self-worth, and he believed music should be intimately connected to all of human experience. Perhaps this explains the breathless sensuality, the roaring passion and mystic spirituality of his music. All of human life is here, in all its ecstasy, agony, terror and beauty.

In his piano music, he reveals himself as a master of the miniature, and while he wrote 10 piano sonatas – interesting in themselves as they chart his compositional development (nos. 5 to 10 are included on this album) – his shorter works for piano, including some 85 Preludes, distil in microcosm his unique style.

If anything, Scriabin’s late piano music is perhaps his most interesting, revealing his move away from the “pure” Chopin/Schumann/Liszt-influenced romanticism of the nineteenth century as he experimented with unusual harmonies (his “mystic chord”, derived from a dominant 7th) and a kaleidoscopic tonal palette. In addition, fleeting fragments of melody, fleeting filigree figurations, brooding dream sequences, haunting chromaticism, febrile complex rhythms point towards Schoenberg, Messiaen and the avant garde and leave us wondering what Scriabin might have written had he lived longer into the 20th century.

In this generous 2-disc recording James Kreiling makes a persuasive case for Scriabin’s late piano music, suggesting in his detailed readable liner notes that this is the best place for the Scriabin ingénue to start exploring his music. With scrupulous attention to detail and an insightful approach to the music (James’s doctoral research focussed on the late piano sonatas), James captures the composer’s idiosyncrasies with a compelling naturalness and an acute sensitivity to the shifting moods and colours, combining muscularity and delicacy. The free-form nature of this unusual music and the brevity of many of the works draw the listener into a continuous flow of sound – and a lovely sound it is too. The piano is bright-toned yet warm (the recording was made at Henry Wood Hall with Iain Gordon as piano technician, engineered by Michael Ponder), and stylishly-produced album artwork reflects the high quality of the recording.