Tolstoy described Alexander Scriabin’s music as “a sincere expression of genius” while Scriabin described himself as “all impulse, all desire...” His virtuosity rivalling that of Rachmaninov, the young and colorful musician and composer found inspiration in his idol, Chopin, while still touching his compositions with Russian darkness and sensuous passion. This album of his less-popular compositions also includes the child prodigy’s Canon in D Minor, composed when Scriabin was only 11 years old.
Both Scriabin and Langgaard believed that through their music they could pave the way for a spiritual revolution. The piano offered a perfect and very intimate medium for their highly personal harmonic and expressive vocabularies. Scriabin drew on daemonic associations in his Piano Sonata No. 9 to liberate the old tonal system, whereas Langgaard explored his youthful fascination with Catholicism in music of fanaticism and ecstasy. Langgaard’s The Flame Chambers and Scriabin’s Vers la flamme are feverish musical twins that exemplify both composers’ explosive intensity.
In her New York orchestral debut with conductor Philippe Entremont, Anna Petrova was praised for her "ultra-smooth playing style" [New York Fine Arts Examiner]. She is an assistant professor of piano at the University of Louisville, KY, holds a PhD in musicology from the Manhattan School of Music, and performs frequently as a soloist and chamber musician. The album presents the music of four composers: Sergey Rachmaninoff, Sergey Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, and Pancho Vladigerov. Three Russians and one Bulgarian, the music of whom spans a total of 50 years, from 1892 to 1942. “The heart is an ancestral metaphor… For example, it has been sometimes thought as the secret seat of courage or of intelligence; or as a hiding place for emotions; or as a breakable, fragile and precious object that we treasure; as a place from which sincere feelings emanate; as the locus of romantic desire; as the deep, summarizing content of a person… Also, in many languages, the word "heart" comes from either the Latin root cor/cordis, or from the Greek root kardia. That is, Spanish (corazon), French (coeur), and Italian (cuore), to give an example, take the Latin root, while German (Herz) and English (heart) take the Greek one (kardia). But what is most important for my present purposes here, and what these two roots share amongst each other, is their connection to the Indo-European root kr, which has the original sense of "vibrating." Indeed, the two consonants sound like that when pronounced together, like a gentle vibration. Krrr.... In this very sense, too, a heart is a vibrating object, a vibrating, secret, treasured place - just like I wanted the piano and my playing of it to be in this album - a dear object that secretly vibrates with the sounds of my music.” (Anna Petrova)
