# Scriabin's First



## jayeff

There's a great deal of music which, I suspect, is just about never played in the concert hall - though I am happy to be corrected on this. An example is Scriabin's beautiful Symphony No 1, with the gorgeous choral last movement. Is it ever performed? Do any members know of any plans for it to be performed in 2015/6? I would try to organise my travel plans (from Australia) around such an event.


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## phlrdfd

I don't know about next season, but the Chicago Symphony performed Scriabin's first symphony in New York yesterday.


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## DeepR

I was lucky enough to hear this symphony in concert last year, performed by the LSO with Gergiev. They performed the Poem of Ecstasy during the same concert. Since I love both pieces I couldn't pass up that opportunity and I made a trip to London specifically for this event. It was a great evening that I will not forget. 
The performance of the first was not very well received by some reviewers, but who cares. It is a great symphony, flawed perhaps, from a certain point of view, but very beautiful nonetheless.


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## papsrus

I was at Carnegie last Friday for the CSO's performance of Scriabin's Third (which I was not familiar with). Excellent. CSO outstanding.

Here's a couple of snippets from the NYTimes' review summing up all three nights of the CSO's Carnegie stay last weekend. The opening comments below confirm my own impressions from Friday, where I was swept away not by the famed brass, but rather the rich strings. Perhaps Muti is steering the orchestra toward that Philadelphia sound.

NYT:

"Think bigger, not louder, all the time," Christopher Martin, the principal trumpeter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, said to a young player on Saturday afternoon during a master class in the new education wing atop Carnegie Hall. During the latter stages of Georg Solti's tenure as that ensemble's music director (1969-91), loudness seemed almost a fetish, especially among brass players.

That changed some under Solti's immediate successor, Daniel Barenboim, and to judge from the orchestra's three Carnegie concerts last weekend, Riccardo Muti, who became music director in 2010, has expunged that quality almost completely with a new generation of players. Those brasses now blend into a deeply cultured overall sonority, plush and nuanced, not unlike the one Mr. Muti left behind at the Philadelphia Orchestra when he stepped down as music director there in 1992.

(...)

The weekend's programs had no unifying theme, but there were little ties back and forth. One was a commemoration of the centenary of *Alexander Scriabin*, a composer Mr. Muti has long championed, with two symphonies, the Third on Friday evening and the First on Sunday.

The First is infrequently performed, partly, no doubt, because it calls for tenor and mezzo-soprano soloists and a chorus. But those very demands made it a fine logistical fit with "Nevsky" and its mezzo-soprano and chorus. In the First, the clarion-voiced tenor Sergey Skorokhodov filled out the forces.

Completed in 1900, the First Symphony uses voices only in the last of its six movements, a paean to art. The chorus, in fact, sings only the last two lines of a Scriabin poem, "Glory to Art/Glory forever," spinning them into a rousing fugue.

The textless Third Symphony ("The Divine Poem") is better known, if not exactly central to the repertory. More diffuse and mystical than the First, it is meant to represent "the evolution of the human spirit," according to a note - presumably Scriabin's - distributed at the work's premiere in 1905. The titled movements ("Struggles," "Exquisite Pleasures," "Divine Play") run together in a sort of endless Wagnerian fusion.

Mr. Muti's grasp of the work's long span seemed complete, and the orchestra responded with like concentration. The musicians and Mr. Muti also made an excellent case for the First."


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## Vaneyes

2015:* Scriabin* 100th Memorial Anniversary.

CSO/Muti *Scriabin* reviews from recent Carnegie Hall performances:

Faux reviewer remains unconvinced by *"Maximalist's"* Symphony 3.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4eff7a60-aacd-11e4-81bc-00144feab7de.html

NYCR re Symphony 3-- "Not a hint of feeling." Well, clean the wax out.

http://newyorkclassicalreview.com/2...remake-russian-showpieces-in-their-own-image/

Re Symphony 3 from a bonafide reviewer.

http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=12601

NYCR--Philly string magic in CSO's Scriabin Symphony 1. hee hee

http://newyorkclassicalreview.com/2...remake-russian-showpieces-in-their-own-image/

Re Symphony 1 from a bonafide reviewer.

http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=12603

Future *Scriabin *concerts:

May 13 (London): Sudbin recital includes *Scriabin* Piano Sonata 9, Mazurka in E minor, Op. 25, No. 3.

https://concertwith.me/en_us/event/132236+yevgeny+sudbin


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## DeepR

I saved a recording from the concert I mentioned above, which was available online after the concert. Sound quality could be better, but it's nice to have. If anyone's interested PM me.


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## Vaneyes

DeepR said:


> I was lucky enough to hear this symphony in concert last year, performed by the LSO with Gergiev. They performed the Poem of Ecstasy during the same concert. Since I love both pieces I couldn't pass up that opportunity and I made a trip to London specifically for this event. It was a great evening that I will not forget.
> The performance of the first was not very well received by some reviewers, but who cares. It is a great symphony, flawed perhaps, from a certain point of view, but very beautiful nonetheless.


Yes, Scriabin's an easy target for small-minded critics. Noone wrote like Scriabin, so they've no material to weigh against.


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