Scriabin: Sonata

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ID:53

Alexander Scriabin - Sonatas : Sonata, no 5
Key: n/a	Published: 1907
Level: 8+	Period: Late Romantic
Sonata no 5 (sheet music)

Posts in the piano forum about this piece by Scriabin:

Scriabin - Sonata No. 5
January 14, 2006, 10:11:08 AM by quantum

Well here is a take at Scriabin's 5th sonata. I say "a take" because this kind of music leads itself to wide variation in interpretation. I found this recording turned out longer than I normally play it - I did take my time with the Meno Vivo sections. Every time I play it, it turns out a bit different. I find there are so many different ideas to bring out in the music, that you can't do it all in a single performance.

For those who are not familiar with this music I have included below the program notes I composed for use in my 3rd year university recital:

In December 1907, shortly after finishing his symphony The Poem of Ecstasy Op. 54 Scriabin wrote to a patron: "Today I have almost finished my Fifth Sonata. It is a big poem for piano and I deem it the best piano composition I have ever written. I do not know by what miracle I accomplished it..." As Scriabin later explained, the miracle was that he had "seen" the entire sonata as a vision, as a reality outside himself. It took Scriabin six days to capture the Fifth Sonata on his piano and another three days to write it down. Considering the sonata's frequent passages of "imperious summoning," Scriabin appended a few lines from his own Poem of Ecstasy on to the first page of the score:

I summon you to life, secret yearnings!
You who have been drowned in the dark depths
Of the creative spirit, you timorous
Embryos of life, it is to you that I bring daring."

While the presto con allegrezza passages describe the ecstasy and divine joy of him who dares to answer that call to life, there are explicit sexual overtones in the now ardent and languid slow sections. The Fifth Sonata is also a play of light in music - a subject Scriabin was to further explore in later compositions. The ending is a blaze of high intensity, sheets of vaporous luminosity, blinding and burning.

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Scriabin - Sonata No. 5
Mic: (2x) Studio Projects B1
Interface: Edirol UA-25
Reverb: Adobe Audition - Medium Concert Hall Crisp
Piano: Yamaha C3

Enjoy!