'Some years ago, I recorded an album of late Scriabin piano works, and in hindsight, there are pieces I wish I had also included. The Eighth Sonata is one of them. 2022 marked the sesquicentennial of Scriabin’s birth, and I was invited to perform in several celebratory concerts. One work I was asked to play was this Sonata and serendipitously, there was an opportunity to record it.
Written in 1912-13, the Eighth was in fact the last of Scriabin’s ten sonatas to be completed. It is perhaps the most abstract of his already esoteric later oeuvre. The composer described it as the most difficult of his sonatas and, during the short time between its completion and his death in 1915, he never performed it.
Igor Stravinsky described this Sonata as ‘incomparable’. Scriabin ingeniously employs a variety of techniques including sonata form, leitmotifs, variation and uses his own unique harmonic language to underpin and unify them. The writing is exacting and sophisticated - fully appreciating the work entails imaginatively losing oneself in its elaborate cascades of sound.'
(Yuri Paterson-Olenich)
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