Beethoven Scriabin Lewis Petrenko

Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915) was born in Moscow. His mother was a concert pianist, but died when Alexander was just a year old, and his father mostly worked abroad. He grew up with his grandmother and two aunts, and one of them often played the piano to him. The boy eventually learned to both play and build pianos, and he composed his own music, plays and operas for his puppet theatre. Later, he became a student at the conservatory and good friends with Serge Rachmaninov, who was a year younger - although they from time to time were also rivals.

Like Rachmaninov, he wrote mainly music for his own instrument - the piano - in the beginning. He was excited by the music of Schumann and Liszt, but mostly for that of Frederic Chopin. Scriabin wrote his first and only concerto for piano in 1896, and it displays a strong influence of Chopin’s music. Scriabin also wrote piano sonatas, and it is this music which has been the most played (and recorded) after the composer’s death.

In 1899 he started his Symphony No. 1, and in the course of almost ten years he wrote five larger pieces for orchestra or symphonies where he gradually extricated himself from the traditional framework of the symphony. The first symphony has six movements and the second has five, the third has four parts which are played consecutively, and both Symphony No. 4 (Poem of Ecstacy) from 1904 and Symphony No. 5 (Prometheus) from 1910 are played as one movement. In the course of writing these symphonies he developed his musical language dramatically, from a late-Romantic to a Modernistic direction.

If we disregards the first movement, which has the title Introduction and presents the musical ideas in the rest of the symphony, the division of movements in Symphony No. 2 follows the traditional pattern for a symphony with four movements: the second movement is an energetic and dynamic Allegro, the third a warm, melodic and calm Andante. which is introduced by a flute solo imitating bird song. Then comes a strong and Scherzo-like fourth movement with the title Tempestoso, before the mighty, almost triumphant finale Maestoso.

Despite the fact that the symphony as a whole is far more traditional both in terms of form and on a pure musical level than Scriabin’s later works for orchestra, there are enough particular sounds and intense effects which bind the music to the composer’s unique expression. It was perhaps these which prompted many of the first listeners in St. Petersburg to react to it with boos. Scriabin was devastated by the reception, but had already started his next symphonies, which would be far better received in the concert hall.

In his last works, Scriabin practically left traditional tonality behind, albeit in a different way from that of Arnold Schoenberg. In contrast to Schoenberg he did not have any real musical successors who took his ideas further, and much of his music remained unplayed for many years, this including the Second Symphony. In our own time, the interest in Scriabin is growing, and the Oslo Philharmonic is in the process of recording all five symphonies - the Second in connection with this concert.