Where can I get my hands on Scriabin's Mysterium?

[rachmaninoff_forever]

Okay, I know it's an unfinished work, but  Alexander Nemtin recorded three hours of it!

Where can I get my hands on those three hours?!

And I know there's piano playing in it so I'm not posting the wrong thread in the wrong forum; I'm not breaking any rules.

For those of you who don't know what Mysterium is, I'll give you a little background information.  Or  rather, I'll copy and paste some background information from Wikipedia:


Mysterium is an unfinished musical work by composer Alexander Scriabin. He started working on the composition in 1903, but it was incomplete at the time of his death in 1915.
Scriabin planned that the work would be synesthetic, exploiting the senses of smell and touch as well as hearing. He wrote that
"There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."
Scriabin intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by "nobler beings".
At the time of his death, Scriabin left 72 pages of sketches for a prelude to the Mysterium entitled Prefatory Action. These sketches have been completed by Alexander Nemtin to form a three-hour-long work, a task that took him 28 years, and recorded.

I can only get 45 minutes of it but does anyone know where I can find the full three hours?

[j_menz]

It's available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Preparation-Final-Mystery-Alexander/dp/B00002R2SQ/ref=pd_sim_sbs_m_1

You may also be interested to know that there is a live performance scheduled for July this year in British Columbia, Canada. Details at https://www.yarilomusic.com/concerts-events/the-prefatory-act-imagining-scriabins-mysterium/

Since it was supposed to end with the end of the world, we can possibly be glad it is an unfinished work.

[rachmaninoff_forever]

It's available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Preparation-Final-Mystery-Alexander/dp/B00002R2SQ/ref=pd_sim_sbs_m_1

You may also be interested to know that there is a live performance scheduled for July this year in British Columbia, Canada. Details at https://www.yarilomusic.com/concerts-events/the-prefatory-act-imagining-scriabins-mysterium/

Since it was supposed to end with the end of the world, we can possibly be glad it is an unfinished work.

Thanks so much!  Unfortunately I can't go to Canada to see a performance.  I'm only 16 and I'm the only person in my family who listens to/plays classical music...

But yeah thanks, I'm buying it! 



Once I get my allowance...

[ahinton]

For what mention of it is worth, listening to a recording or attending a live performance of such as there is of this work (including all the reconstructive labours of Nemtin) somehow of itself defeats a fundamental part of the composer's avowed intent, to the extent of the quotation from him that, at such a performance, "there will not be a single spectator - all will be participants"; it's almost analogous to the first occasion on which a pianist other than its composer performed Sorabji's Concerto per suonare da me solo - i.e. a concerto (in which the pianist occupies the dual rôle of soloist and orchestra) "to be played by myself alone".

How close to the composer's intentions Nemtin has got after all those years of work on the Prefatory Act is probably hard to say, although I would certainly defer to an authority on the composer such as Jonathan Powell, whose opinions on it I have not yet heard; what would have become of progress on the work as a whole had the composer survived much longer than he did is, however, ever more open to question, since the very nature of his (literally) fantastic vision and his aspirations and ambitions for Mysterium would presumably have come into grave and perhaps even irresoluble conflict with the increasingly tragic events of world history that were gathering around him at the time of his death.