Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
Prometheus: the Poem of Fire Op. 60 (1908-1910, transcr. for seven pianos by Chitose Okashiro)
Two Poèmes Op. 63 (1912)
Two Poèmes Op. 69 (1913)
Poème-Nocturne Op. 61 (1912)
Chitose Okashiro (piano)
rec. 2017/2019, Palais Montcalm, Quebec City, Canada
CHÂTEAU C20003 [55]
The main work here is a curiosity but an interesting one. It is a transcription of Scriabin’s Prometheus, his last and finest orchestral work, for what is billed as seven pianos. Actually there is one piano, but it is multitracked up to seven times, each time played by the same pianist, Chitose Okashiro, who specializes in recording piano versions of orchestral works, as a search through MWI establishes. She previously made a two-piano version of the Poem of Ecstasy.
To explain what this feat involves, I need to say something about Prometheus itself. The original mythological figure was a Titan who stole fire from Apollo and gave it to mankind. Scriabin also identified him with Lucifer, the fallen angel. His tone poem, subtitled The Poem of Fire, celebrates the creative principle; different sections evoke Human Reason, the Dawn of Human Consciousness, the Joy of Life and Self-Realization. However, the divisions between these are not clearly marked, and you can really forget about them. The work is post-impressionist, rhapsodic and full of filigree detail and delicate as well as powerful writing. Scriabin commissioned a picture for the cover of the score from Jean Delville, which shows a lyre rising from a lotus, and the face of Prometheus over a star of David. You can see it
here. The work is scored for a large orchestra: quadruple woodwind, eight horns, two harps, lots of percussion and an organ. There is also a wordless choir, a popular effect of the time, as in Debussy’s Nocturnes, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe and Holst’s Planets – and also two other instruments. One is a solo piano, making this a piano concertante work, though it is not officially a concerto. The other is a light-keyboard, an instrument which Scriabin intended to project colour into the auditorium according to a scheme which linked individual colours to keys. There are people, known as synaesthetes, who ‘see’ colours in hearing music, and Scriabin may have been one of them, as were certainly Rimsky-Korsakov before him and Messiaen more recently. Realizing the colour effects was beyond the available technology in Scriabin’s time and is still pretty difficult. I have attended performances both with and without light effects and I have to say that I can do without them. Scriabin also sanctioned such performances. The lavish resources required mean that the work is only occasionally performed, but there are several recordings. Of those I know, I can recommend Alexeev with Muti and Argerich with Abbado.
The texture of the work is rich, hence the need for all those piano lines in transcribing it for keyboard. Okashiro started with the solo piano part and progressively added versions of the orchestral lines. The result is that nearly everything in the orchestral score is realized on the piano. Okashiro maintains that Scriabin’s original musical ideas were pianistic, and so transcribing his orchestral work for piano in effect gives back what started there. I am not so sure. Instead of the colours of the orchestra we have the relative monochrome of the piano, and of course the contrast between solo piano and orchestra completely disappears. Add to this that long sustained notes have to be represented by tremolo, which, even though Liszt used the device, never sounds really satisfactory to me, and also that there is simply no way of representing the wordless choir, and the result is a tour de force which nevertheless falls considerably short of what the orchestral version offers. Okashiro is a nimble player but I feel that she lingers too much in the languid sections, although she is brisk enough in the fast ones. Adrian Boult once said, in a radio talk, that Scriabin’s orchestral works were real orchestral music and not just orchestrated piano works, the opposite view to that of Okashiro, and I am afraid that, despite the ingenuity of her transcription, he is right.
The disc is filled up with recordings of two sets of piano Poèmes, Opp. 63 and 69, which are nicely done, despite again a tendency to linger too much. There is also a version of the rather rarer Poème-Nocturne Op. 61, which is a rather rambling work. The disc is still rather short measure for today. The recording is clear, though Prometheus is rather clangorous, perhaps as a result of all that multi-tracking. The booklet, in English and Japanese, discusses many aspects of Scriabin’s Prometheus, including the light keyboard and the mystic chord which underpins the work. As I said, this is a curiosity, but an interesting one.
Stephen Barber
