Scriabin's Fifth Piano Sonata

Last night (Jan. 19, 2019) Arcadi Volodos did not play Scriabin’s Fifth Piano Sonata as he had announced and as I had so desperately hoped. Instead, he finished the regular program with Vers la flamme, which is also a piece filled with passion and quite an orgasmic ending, but still…it doesn't have this poem accompanying it:

''I call you to life, O mysterious forces! Drowned in the obscure depths Of the creative spirit, timid Shadows of life, to you I bring daring.''

I first heard the Fifth in the summer of 1989. Scriabin was unknown to me until I attended the William Kapell Piano Competition in Maryland and heard several of the contestants play it. The eventual winner, Haesun Paik, played it in each of the three rounds. It is not every day that I fall in love with a piece of music after hearing it a half-dozen times, but this was an exception. I even drove up to New York to hear her play it in Avery Fisher Hall and then took a road trip to Chattanooga to hear it again. She has laid down quite a career since then. 

Fast-forward five years. I was visiting a friend who was practicing it and told me it’s not impossible to play, and she showed me how to play the six against four in the second theme. I got the music soon afterwards and began practicing. After a few months my downstairs neighbor asked me if I was preparing for a recital or competition. I guess four hours a day of the first four pages of a piece can give people strange ideas. In any case, my unbridled passion flowed into learning and playing that piece. I also learned Scriabin’s Prelude Op. 16, No. 1 after falling in love with Horowitz’s recording of it.

Since 1989 I have been to 1,000 piano recitals but have heard the piece played live only once. Jura Margulis played it at the Zeltmusikfestival in Freiburg around 1996. The ambiance was not conducive to conveying the mystical character of the piece, but I appreciated his performance. While I taught English to Jura's father, Vitaly Margulis, before he moved to Los Angeles in 1996, we spoke about this sonata and I remember playing Walter Gieseking's recording for him. After rolling my eyes at the German pianist's hatchet job of the last page, Vitaly said in his defense, "But if it is very musically played like that, a few wrong notes don't matter."

These days you can hear and see the piece played on YouTube by Marc-André Hamelin (an old recording from a live recital in Japan), Yuja Wang (mediocre sound quality but brilliant technique from a live recital), Yevgeny Sudbin, Daniel Trifinov (minus the first page, but an excellent performance), Claire Hammond (technically the best video and a very enjoyable performance) and a couple more pianists, but for a piece that is considered one of the greatest sonatas in the repertoire, there is quite a thin offering there. Recordings without video footage are also there, but one in particular is missing. On Spotify I discovered a magical recording by Igor Zhukov (also spelled Shukov on Spotify, so search for both). After listening to this piece for decades, I thought I had finally found someone who was able to bring out all the music in this piece. As with any piece, the pianist must have an abundance of technique and enough understanding of the composition to make it enjoyable to the listener. The piece is full of descending chromatic lines, jumpy chord progressions, climaxes arrived at by ascending chromatic progressions and repeated fortissimo chords.

For the amateur pianist giving it a go, it is a lot of bang for the buck. A Chopin Etude, for example, may have beautiful chord progressions and wonderful harmonies, but you have to learn a lot of notes in order to get to the drama. Scriabin gives you drama in every measure! And the best thing about this sonata is that it is relatively open to interpretation. Listen to Glenn Gould play (his version/edition of) it! Listen to Walter Gieseking's hatchet job, especially of the last page. Then listen to Horowitz or Richter. Worlds of difference. Or how about Scriabin's son-in-law, Vladimir Sofronitsky!? Then you pick up the music and you are in a certain place in your life and you put your whole self into the music. This piece will accept everything you’ve got to offer and then take you a step further.

To be fair to Volodos, his wonderfully tender playing of Schubert, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin's other works would have been upset by the heat of the Fifth Sonata. So I'll just keep at it and hope my passion continues to burn for this music.

On February 9, 2019, I had a party with some good friends and played the first 10 (of 19) pages for them. I got through the first half of it in front of an audience! That was quite a big step for me, even though I realize I've got a long way to go with the piece - but that's the whole purpose of having a dream, right?!

Coda: In November and December 2019 I played the entire sonata through three times for three different audiences. I had reached the summit of my Everest. The last performance was on a Bösendorfer Imperial that I had never touched before. After decades of dedication to the piece, the interpretation was certainly heartfelt, even if the technique was a bit lacking. 

In January 2020 I realized that all the practice on this piece and on Chopin's Etude Op. 10 # 12 had ruined my thumb joints. I am no longer able to play the piano without experiencing pain after a couple of minutes.