Showing posts with label Alexander Scriabin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexander Scriabin. Show all posts

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Skrjabin

Alexander Scriabin
24"x16", oil on canvas paper, 2014
I forgot to mention in the previous post that I also turned fifty during the summer. Not that it has too much to do with anything but it may the reason that I suddenly start playing selections from this substantial collection of classical music of mine. Not only because classical music is more suitable for a fifty year-old than say punk-rock, but also that at that age one starts to recollect memories from the past (and play the same music you played twenty-five years ago.) Sonate No. 3 op. 23 from the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin belongs to that category. It made it into my top 100 twenty-five years ago but remained unplayed since. Until just recently that is. My archive still spelled his name the Dutch way: Skrjabin, which is actually identical to how it is spelled on the German vinyl record I bought a little while back that features the sonata in question. I never had a copy save for an old cassette tape that is long lost. I don't know who played piano on that old tape that I copied from a radio broadcast. The pianist on the German record is Vitalij Margulis from the Soviet Union. He was born in Kharkiv in what is now Ukraine (the north-eastern part of it. Yet another instance in which the top 100 selections parallel the news. Purely coincidental this time.)