Scriabin - Complete Sonatas - Hyperion: CDA67131-2 - 2 CDs or download

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Scriabin was an ambitious composer. A romantic alchemist, he saw his music as a transmuting agent. Through its influence pain would become happiness and hate become love, culminating in a phoenix-like... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010 More…

Catalogue No: CDA67131-2
Label: Hyperion
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 6

Work length21:33

$4.40

$6.00

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

I. Allegro con fuocoso

Track length8:06

$1.10

$1.50

II. [crotchet = 40]

Track length4:55

$1.10

$1.50

III. Presto

Track length2:58

$1.10

$1.50

IV. Funèbre

Track length5:34

$1.10

$1.50

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor, Op. 19 'Sonata Fantasy'

Work length12:18

$2.20

$3.00

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

I. Andante

Track length8:43

$1.10

$1.50

II. Presto

Track length3:35

$1.10

$1.50

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 3 in F sharp minor, Op. 23

Work length19:32

$4.40

$6.00

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

I. Drammatico

Track length6:49

$1.10

$1.50

II. Allegretto

Track length2:28

$1.10

$1.50

III. Andante

Track length4:39

$1.10

$1.50

IV. Presto con fuoco

Track length5:36

$1.10

$1.50

Scriabin: Fantasy in B minor, Op. 28

Work length8:56

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 4 in F sharp major, Op. 30

Work length8:00

$2.20

$3.00

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

I. Andante

Track length3:32

$1.10

$1.50

II. Prestissimo volando

Track length4:28

$1.10

$1.50

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 5 in F sharp major, Op. 53

Work length12:46

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 6, Op. 62

Work length11:07

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 7, Op. 64 'White Mass'

Work length11:24

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 8, Op. 66

Work length12:09

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 9, Op. 68 'Black Mass'

Work length8:40

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70

Work length11:45

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Scriabin: Sonata-Fantaisie in G sharp minor (1886)

Work length7:15

$1.10

$1.50

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

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Both as composer and virtuoso pianist, Scriabin was heir to the Classical and Romantic sonata tradition, but the transformation of this musical language in his own works was to be crucial for the survival of the sonata principle into the twentieth century. This set includes all ten of the 'mature' Sonatas, the Fantaisie, Op 28, and the youthful Sonate-fantaisie. This last, published only after the composer's death, shows an astonishingly sure hand developing in the fourteen-year-old.

Reviews

2010

Scriabin was an ambitious composer. A romantic alchemist, he saw his music as a transmuting agent. Through its influence pain would become happiness and hate become love, culminating in a phoenix-like rebirth of the universe.
With Shakespearian agility he would change the world's dross into 'something rich and strange'. Not surprisingly, given Scriabin's early prowess as a pianist, the 10 sonatas resonate with exoticism, ranging through the First Sonata's cries of despair, to the Second Sonata's Baltic Sea inspiration, the Third Sonata's 'states of being', the 'flight to a distant star' (No 4) and 'the emergence of mysterious forces' (No 5). Nos-7 and 9 are White and Black Mass Sonatas respectively, and the final sonatas blaze with trills symbolising an extra-terrestrial joy and incandescence.
Such music makes ferocious demands on the pianist's physical stamina and imaginative resource. However, Marc-André Hamelin takes everything in his stride. Blessed with rapier reflexes he nonchalantly resolves even the most outlandish difficulties. He launches the First Sonata's opening outcry like some gleaming trajectory and, throughout, his whistle-stop virtuosity is seemingly infallible.
You might, however, miss a greater sense of the music's Slavonic intensity, its colour and character; a finer awareness, for example, of the delirious poetry at the heart of the Second Sonata's whirling finale. Hamelin's sonority is most elegantly and precisely gauged but time and again his fluency (admittedly breathtaking) erases too much of the work's originality and regenerative force. However, he shows a greater sense of freedom in the Fifth Sonata, and in the opalescent fantasy of the later sonatas, he responds with more evocative skill to subjective terms, as well as to moments where Scriabin's brooding introspection is lit by sudden flashes of summer lightning.
The recordings are a little tight and airless in the bass and middle register, but the set does includes a superb essay on Scriabin.

Scriabin - Complete Sonatas

2 CDs

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