John Bell Young Scriabin Piano Sonata #5 http://www.mp3.com/johnbellyoung Scriabin is controversial, and for all of the wrong reasons - his ideas of theosophy and grandiose projects have sometimes overshadowed his work. His contemporaries were more impressed with his ideas, and more immune to judging him based on those ideas. One of his friends, after listening to him discourse for an hour came away thinking "Scriabin will compose a great work, and I shall conduct it." What is really subversive about Scriabin's music is not the harmony - though it has been often imitated - but his entire approach to musical structure. He dispensed with the entire system of resolution which drove Western music for 3 centuries, he followed Wagner and Liszt's ideas of extramusical structure made tangible in musical technique. It was the high point of an idea which would be attacked by almost every major composer of the early modern. This idea is, today, still radical enough to cause problems. In the present music with extra-musical ideas presents a simplified musical technique to make sure the ideas overwhelm the music. Scriabin is the opposite of composers like Danielpour - he believed that pure idea would overwhelm the listener - loosed by a musical substance beyond pure comprehension. John Bell Young is controversial pianist, for all of the wrong reasons. He is controversial because of his uncompromising stance, for the vigour with which he pursues his ideas, for eschewing the normal career path for musicians, he looses his temper and tells people off. In a world where the mediocre claim the priviledge of annointing who is great, these habits of mind and aspects of personality cause problems. But this is not what he should be known for. Instead what should be controversial is his entire approach to pianism, and its relationship to the works of Scriabin in particular. The direction of post war pianism has been towards greater and greater accuracy, often at the expense of all other virtues. Pianists learned to type perfectly - misspellings the ultimate evil. This direction is completely at odds with the entire school of Beethoven - Which continues to this through the line captured by Czerny and Liszt. In this school, the foundation of the Russian school of piano, the most important single trait of a pianist is the understanding of the grammar of the work, sensitivity to the meaning that that grammar is used to convey. Mistakes of notes are as inconsequential to understanding as an accent would be - only where they obscure the fundemental meaning are they problematical. The most celebrated Scriabin sonata cycle of our day belongs to Andre-Marc Hamelin. AMH is a pianist equivelant to Heifitz as a violinist - possessed of tremendous mechanism, and who no technical problem holds any terror for. This in many cases is a great asset - but in many it is a defict, because AMH is incapable of conveying anything which he does not feel technically. This is a particular problem in Scriabin. Because the technical challenges of the music hold no terror for him, his performances convey no terror to others. Let me take an analogy: as a child ghost stories frighten us, but not as adults. However, an actor playing the Ghost in Hamlet must convey terror by his art, or the effect of the play is lost. Even if ghosts do not frighten him, he must frighten others by being a ghost. Thus while AMH's performances are invaluable for making people willing to explore Scriabin's music, the are the entry, but not the destination. Other pianists, and another kind of pianism, must convey the truth of the music, much as a reading through of a Shakespeare play will remove the stumbling block of language, but it will not be *Shakespeare* until it is turned into a stage production, with all of the beauties of the language returned to it. In this sonata we see exactly what is needed - an understanding of the grammar of Scriabin's piano music. In this music, the thrust of the music must be beyond the purely tonal implications of the chords, and instead must rely on following the continuity of the counterpoint, which shapes the sections of the music. The playing surges at the point where the line breaks, and not necessarily at the point of chromatic resolution. This is crucial - instead of being the division between consonance and dissonance, the chromatic shift is a sensuous and continuous motion. It is caressed by the pianists hands -- by a turn of the wrist which maintains the line even though in - for example Brahms - the wrist would shift, thus enforcing a break. The composer of the same time who requires the same approach is Debussy, and the result is the same - the liberation of melody. The liberation of melody in the Scriabin sonata #5 is conveyed here by having the larger melody conveyed. Each climax must stand in relation to the previous in its place of this middle ground melody. To take an analogy, in Chopin, he would occassionally write one note in an arpeggio much larger so as to accentuate that this was the melodic note, and that it stood in relation to the next melodic note as well as to the notes in the arpeggio. Scriabin, Chopin student that he was, and student of Taniev's counterpoint, took this idea yet farther, and had many temporally separated events and created melodies. There are layers within layers within layers. If you had before you a vinyl record of this performance, you could speed it up, and the middle ground would become appearant to you, the sonata would still make sense at this speed, there would be audible, the melody that shapes the work. In JBY's performance the full shape of this melody is brought out, Hamelin, by his very evenness destroys this. This is crucial for Scriabin. In a composer such as Brahms, there is a middle ground melody, but it is purely tonal logic which shapes it. Dynamics are not a part of the equation. The difference between the middle ground of Brahms and the middle ground of Scriabin, is the same as the difference in melody between Haydn and Beethoven. For Haydn the melody makes sense regardless of dynamic, for Beethoven, the dynamics are part of the melody, the shifts from sf to p are intergral to its understanding. Scriabin applied the same transition to middle ground melody that Beethoven had to the foreground. In this he broke with the New German School. Liszt and Wagner made the middle ground melody dependant on *colour* not *dynamic*. The school of composition that flows forward searches for new colourations. For Scriabin, as for other Russians, colour is related to key, the logic of colour is no different from the logic of key, it is dynamic which is flexible. For Germanic tonality, dynamics are related to key, and hence it is colour that is flexible. This core divergence, the focal point of Scriabin's theories of perception, is the element which JBY makes clear to us. For a Chopinist - as Scriabin was - colour is related to fingering. Each finger has a colour. Chopin could correct students fingering *when he was standing in the next room*. So too with Scriabin - colour is *separate* from pure dynamics at the keyboard, but encompasses a motion of the whole body to produce the exact amount of tension, timing and dynamic which *taken together* produce the effect of colour at the piano. Perhaps I am sensitive to this because it is an element misunderstood in my own music - that the cycle of climax to crash is not a mistake, but instead an indication of structure. To understand what JBY has accomplished, one must realise that Scriabin interleaves melody by expression - when you feel ecstatic - there is a sound which imprints itself upon your psyche. The next note in this melody occurs the next time you feel ecstatic. In Scriabin each state of mind is continuous with itself, you must enter a twilight world of pure despair to understand the logic of despair, pure ecstasy to understand the logic of ecstasy. Hence, without the ability to create the correct relationship between moments, the door to this world is closed. JBY opens this door by precise severings of phrase, by allowing us to fall from progressively greater heights to progressively deeper chasms, until, magically, the height and the chasm resolve themselves into one pure chord, which is beyond the logic of any key. One can only hope that now people have heard what Scriabin says, that they will be driven to hear what he means. Just as *Shakespeare in Love* is a wonderous romp and act of Bardolatry, but it would be terrible if people felt they *knew* Shakespeare. With all religions, one must make the pilgrimage. Stirling Newberry