“Scriabin wished to mix all aesthetic expertise in a single, mystical musical imaginative and prescient,” writes pianist Daniil Trifonov.
Described as a “poet, thinker, musician, mystic, visionary and egotist,” Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) pushed Romanticism to the breaking level. Experiencing a mixing of senses often called synesthesia, he related musical keys with colours.
Scriabin composed the solo piano Etudes, Op. 42 in 1903. The tempestuous Etude No. 5 in C-sharp minor has been described as “the middle of gravity” for the set. It careens dangerously between ominousness, terror and anxiousness, and hovering, ecstatic heroism. The rating is inscribed with the interpretive marking, Affannato (“breathless” in Italian). The composer lauded it as “an Etude that surpasses the Third Symphony in energy and grandeur.”
This efficiency, that includes Daniil Trifonov, befell in November of 2019 as a part of Deutsche Grammophon’s Yellow Lounge sequence. “Casual but intensely centered on the music,” the sequence, which started in 2001, takes place in German nightclubs.
