PROGRAM
Alexander Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 10 (1913)
Robert Schumann: Fantasy Pieces / Fantasiestücke, Op. 111 (1851)
1. Very quickly, with passionate expression
2. Quite slow
3. Powerful and very marked
Unsuk Chin: Piano Etudes
1. In C
5. Toccaten
J.S. Bach: Partita No. 5 in G Major
1. Praeludium
2. Allemande
3. Corrente
4. Sarabande
5. Menuet
6. Passepied
7. Gigue
Listening Guide
Pianist Lee Dionne brings together works by Schumann and Scriabin -- composers marked by their creative imaginations -- in a two-part series.
Towards the end of his life, the Russian mystic, visionary, and composer Alexander Scriabin came to revere insects for their qualities of “ceaseless activity, fluttering, illumination, and seduction," viewing them as potent symbols of enlightenment. These qualities are evident in his final Tenth Sonata for piano, which he called privately to his friends, the 'Insect' Sonata.
Ceaseless activity is certainly the driving force behind the first of Schumann's Op. 111 Fantasy Pieces as well. Known for his artistic temperament and mercurial alter-ego "Florestan," the pen-name for many of Schumann's early works, these fantasy pieces show as stark a juxtaposition of styles as we see in any of Schumann's longer cycles, beginning with the phantasmagorical (mvmt 1), brushing with the poetic (mvmt 2), and ending with a kind of twilit chivalric vision (mvmt 3).
If both Schumann and Scriabin are known for their "visionary" qualities, then perhaps Unsuk Chin provides a fitting interlude on the program, Unsuk Chin's music proving, of course, to be some of the most psycho-acoustically, mind-bendingly visionary (in a hallucinatory sense) music of the 20th / 21st-century. But even for those of us who, unlike Scriabin, who are perhaps not blessed with seeing colour in sound, what we hear in Unsuk Chin's music is the sense of pure delight that leads us, finally, into the Bach: Bach who, like Schumann and Scriabin, transports us, not through harmonic means, but through the elegant, perfectly poised lightness of dance.