Complete Piano Sonatas

by Alexander Scriabin

Like Chopin, Scriabin made the piano the focus of his art. Among the supreme achievements of that art are the ten sonatas he composed between 1892 and 1913, works that abundantly display both his technical virtuosity and the exhilarating emotional gamut he ranged with such individuality.
All ten of Scriabin's sonatas are reprinted here from the authoritative Russian edition published in 1964. The first four reveal the influences of the pianism of Chopin and Liszt. The subsequent sonatas richly display Scriabin's emerging impressionist techniques and his deep attraction to mysticism, which progressively conjured a more and more ethereal framework of sound, now brooding and introspective, now rhapsodic and exultant.
In both their technical requirements and their emotional demands, these brilliant works will offer pianists a deeply satisfying challenge. Nonpianists will also enjoy this finely made edition, with which they may follow, music in hand, the growing number of loved and recorded performances of these masterpieces.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Alexander Nikolayevich Skrjabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин) was a Russian composer and pianist. In his early years he was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and wrote works in a relatively tonal, late Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his highly influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical language, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer. His son, Julian Scriabin, a child prodigy, was a composer and pianist in his own right, but he died by drowning at the age of eleven in Ukraine.

Scriabin was one of the most innovative and controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin's oeuvre exerted a salient influence on the music world over time, and influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol Szymanowski. However, Scriabin's importance in the Russian and then Soviet musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death. According to his biographer Faubion Bowers, "No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death." Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano and other works have been increasingly championed, garnering significant acclaim in recent years.

Reviews

[Samuel Sencabaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is all 10 of scriabin's piano sonatas, listening to them with the music in sequential order gives a great view into his progression as a musician over his life/works.