Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 12/30/2015, uploaded on 07/27/2016

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Scriabin wrote Sonata No. 5 in 1907, his first single-movement sonata. He described this sonata as "a great poem of the piano." After he completed it, he wrote to a patron: "I consider it to be the best of my works for piano. I do not know myself what kind of a miracle has happened."

This composition marks the end of Scriabin's middle period and transition to his later atonal period. Although it is marked with the F-sharp major key signature, the entire sonata is highly dissonant and avoids tonal chords, creating ambiguous tonality in some sections.

Scriabin included an epigraph to this sonata, from his essay Le Poème de l'Extase. The English translation is:

I call you to life, oh mysterious forces!

Drowned in the obscure depths

Of the creative spirit, timid

Shadows of life, to you I bring audacity!

                                                                                                                          Notes by Weiwen Ma

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.