On Sunday Valery Gergiev begins his cycle of Alexander Scriabin's symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra. It's one of the most significant celebrations of the Russian composer's orchestral music in this country, and it's a chance to throw yourself into one of the most orgiastic, ecstatic, and extreme musics in the repertoire. Scriabin spent the last years of his all-too-short life (he died after a sore on his lip became septic; the infection killed him at the age of 43 in 1915) obsessed with the idea of a piece he called "Mysterium", whose performance - in a specially built temple in the Himalayas, with every member of the audience a participant in a total-work-of-art to end all total-works-of-art that would involve dance, words, lights, smells, and music - would bring about the end of the world as we know it, and usher in a new era for humanity. He thought of most of his mature music as fragments of this mystical vision - as bridges to the beyond; and while, for some, this kind of egocentric philosophising makes Scriabin a wild-eyed eccentric, he's part of an honourable (or dishonourable, if you prefer) tradition of composers who wanted their music to bring about some kind of aesthetic, social, or cosmic apocalypse: Wagner's Ring Cycle, Stockhausen's Licht-Zyklus.



Scriabin was left frustrated at the altar of the impossible, unrealisable Mysterium project (sketches for a "Prefatory Act" have been posthumously realised; his text for this portion of the piece survives too). And while he may have felt the music he did manage to complete could only be a provisional upbeat to the mysteries of Mysterium, that's not how it sounds now. In his orchestral music and his 10 piano sonatas, and other piano music, I think Scriabin did actually achieve his dream. Much of this music really is a vision of another world, because of the heightened invention and compression of Scriabin's forms - the late piano sonatas are all cast in astonishingly distilled single movements; the last two symphonic works, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, achieve their otherworldly ambitions in 20 minutes or so - and the intensity of his unique harmonic language.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scriabin's Sixth Sonata - 'nightmarish, murky, unclean, and mischievous?'

Independently of the Western modernists, Scriabin brought chromatic harmony to a zenith of richness, complexity and emotional expression that he himself found frightening: he couldn't play his Sixth Sonata in public, finding it "nightmarish, murky, unclean, and mischievous". What gives music such as the Black Mass Sonata, the 9th, or the 3rd Symphony, the 'Divine Poem', its power is that while Scriabin wanted all of his pieces to transport his listeners to another realm, he knew he had to devise a new musical apparatus to do so. It's easy to identify the wild colouristic abandon of, say, Prometheus, with its parts for colour-organ (a keyboard that would trigger a light show to accompany the music), mystical chorus, solo piano as well as orchestra, but one way of thinking about the piece is as an elaboration of Scriabin's "mystic chord", a collection of notes you hear at the start of the piece that floats "between consonance and dissonance", as the pianist Dmitri Alexeev put it to me for this week's Music Matters on Radio 3, meaning the whole work is suspended in a hyperreal realm of harmonic and expressive ambiguity. That combination of rigorous modernist exploration and tumultuous sensuality makes Scriabin one of the essential voices of the early 20th century. And if you can't get to the LSO gigs, try these as routes to another world.

Symphony no. 3

Piano Sonata no. 6

Preludes op. 74



The Poem of Ecstasy

Prometheus

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