Alexander Skryabin (Scriabin): The Mystic Skryabin (Altarus)
Given to me by Donna Amato
I know some talented people. I guess we all do, don't we? I mean scary talented. Donna Amato comes in at the top of that list for me.
I came to know Donna when working with her in a Quantum Theater production in 2003 (jeez, where does the time go?). The chamber opera, Kafka's Chimp, required the musicians be on stage with the singers and dancers. I was asked to take part because there's a soprano saxophone part in the score, requiring me to act almost as another character. It's a gig, right?
The production was at an all-purpose room at the Pittsburgh Zoo. A scaffolding was erected for the stage and seating, making the audience look like it was in a cage, viewing the work. Behind everyone and in the middle, Donna played a baby grand piano. She was essential for keeping everyone together. When I looked over the score, it became clear she was playing some difficult passages so gracefully, they didn't sound nearly as difficult as they looked.
Donna showed me what she had started to work on: the Sorabji Piano Symphony #5, a monumentally difficult, long, and demanding work. Despite having been written decades before, the work had never been premiered. She told me she wanted to play the work before she got too old to physically be capable.
Later, I attended a preview of her debut in New York. It's 2.5 hours of hard piano playing. Yes, difficult, but I also mean pounding. Demanding of the performer. Donna played it through with no break except to stand up once or twice between movements, and only one page turn gaff the entire time.
Impressive isn't a strong enough word.
Donna and I have remained friendly; it's nice to run into her once in a while in the halls at CMU. I've given her my recordings when I've released them (and she's clearly listened, commenting on the interesting setting of my duet session with Anthony Braxton), and she's given me hers if she has them on hand.
So here's Scriabin/Skryabin. He might be most famous of attaching colors to different pitches, and creating some sort of "color organ." I can't speak for certain whether he truly had synesthesia, or as I suspect with Messiaen, he had an intuitive response to sound, pitch and harmony.
The pieces on this disc represent Skryabin's final works, opp. 66-74, before his untimely at age 44. The last movement of the final work possibly even sound cut off. Skryabin's music is pushing past triadic harmony at this time, sitting in a kind of ambiguous space between tonality and atonality. There are passages that will end with a chord that's astray from any sort of traditional Western harmony, and I think, how did he arrive at that point? What's that sound?
Donna told me she planned to record all of Skryabin's solo piano works, which would take up about three CDs of length. She also said she wanted to record the last (and strangest) works first, in the event that she wasn't given the chance to record the complete cycle.
And that's what happened. Donna has other releases on the Altarus label, but this is her only program of Skryabin.
I probably wouldn't have known about the Altarus label if not for her releases on it. Most of their releases are solo piano music, ranging from the impossibly obscure (Sorabji, Sewickley's own Ethelbert Nevin) to the familiar (Messiaen's Vingt Regards). The label appears to be inactive now. Which I understand, I mean, how can a label producing physical CDs of unheard piano music possibly sustain itself in this day and age?
Skryabin makes an interesting contrast to his contemporaries. Not as floaty and low-key as Satie, not as expressionist as Schoenberg, more ambiguously tonal than late Debussy. He's kind of in between all of them.
And I'll always support that. that in-betweenness is some of the most interesting territory. Once again I think, where was he headed to, had he lived longer?
And Donna, thanks.
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