Piano Forum

I would start with op 74. Lovely pieces and not too long. I kept putting off Scriabin because I thought I wasn't ready but when I finally did take on a few preludes I noticed that the difficulties are more for the brain than the hands. You play much harder music than me so go for it. It's just different to most other music so it takes a while to get into it.

The sonatas are another story...maybe you are ready, I certainly am not and probably will never be.

And beware, you may get totally sucked into his grazy world 

"Crazy" world? I don't think so. One replete with unusual and wildly exotic fantasy, undoubtedly, but in the music of Scriabin's final years there's nothing remotely woolly-minded; his thinking is highly disciplined and the results of it as precisely and carefully thought out as anything in Chopin. Difficulties? Well, the Eighth and Tenth sonatas certainly have an abundance of those, especially in the glistening fragmented shards that characterise the passages near the close of each and which are especially hard to bring off successfully.

As a means of  acquiring familiarity with Scriabin's later manner, I actually wouldn't begin with the Op. 74 Preludes; these, his last completed work, seem to suggest that the composer had arrived at what needed to be some kind of turning point and, although there's sadly no evidence as to the direction which he might have gone had he even survived to the age of, say, 50, these Preludes might imply some loosening of his dependence on variants of the so-called "mystic chord" that had infused so much of his work from the point at which the potent influence of Chopin (which never quite left him, I think) had begun to become less prevalent. I would therefore recommend the Op. 74 Preludes to those already familiar with Scriabin's creative trajectory up to the point of their composition.

Scriabin's later music is a rich treasure trove of wonders to explore and exerted considerable influence at one time or another upon some of his compatriots including Lourié, Obuhow, Stravinsky (briefly) and, perhaps most significantly, Roslavets, as well as upon Szymanowski in Poland and (Cyril) Scott in England; even his elder contemporary Busoni, who largely inhabited a very different sound world, thought very highly of some of this work, most especially the Ninth Sonata.

Best,

Alistair