Top 10 Hardest Scriabin Pieces for Piano

Introduction: Merry Christmas, otherwise known as happy birthday to Scriabin day! This video covers ten of the most difficult Scriabin works, in highly approximate order, to give you guys an idea of what the hardest Scriabin pieces look and sound like. Also covered in the video are some of the recordings I recommend for each work, along with color commentary in the subtitles. **SCRIABIN DIFFICULTIES** Scriabin is without a doubt one of the least pianistic composers to enter the standard repertoire. His conception of his music on the piano ignores nearly all pianistic conventions of structure and fingering, making it particularly difficult to sightread and memorize. Stretches above an octave permeate all corners of Scriabin’s hardest works, an ironic touch due to Scriabin’s own inability to reach more than a 9th. Awkward, rapid, jumps (in both the left and right hands) and unorthodox polyrhythms must also be mastered before one has a hope of performing Scriabin at a high level. In terms of interpretative difficulty, Scriabin is a particularly tough nut to crack. Especially in the later sonatas, it becomes gradually more difficult to tell where phrases begin and end. And then there is the question of sound—to the uninitiated listener, most of Scriabin’s late sonatas sound mostly the same. However, each was written with an extremely specific color and atmosphere in mind, and the techniques in each work reflect this. The performer must do their best to distinguish each sonata with the mood that they were intended to evoke, and this is no easy task given Scriabin’s phantasmagoric—and even psychedelic—descriptions of his works. Timestamps: 10. Fantaisie in B minor, (7 ) 0:00 Maria Lettberg 9. Vers la flamme, (7 ) 1:22 Dag Achatz 2:01 Vladimir Horowitz 8. Etude No.1 (8) 2:41 Kirill Gerstein 7. Piano Sonata No.9, “Black Mass” (8) 3:05 Anatoly Vedernikov 3:50 Vladimir Baak 6. Piano Concerto in F# Minor, (8) 4:29 Samuil Feinberg 5:15 Stanislav Neuhaus 5. Piano Sonata , (8) 6:07 Mikhail Pletnev 6:49 Vladimir Ashkenazy 4. Piano Sonata No.6, (8 ) 7:31 Håkon Austbø 8:23 Maria Lettberg 3. Piano Sonata No.7, “White Mass“ (8 ) 9:30 Sviatoslav Richter 10:07 Roberto Szidon 2. Piano Sonata No.8, (8 ) 11:12 Dmitri Alexeev 12:07 Vladimir Sofronitsky 1. Piano Sonata No.5, (8 ) 12:41 Sviatoslav Richter 13:31 John Ogdon 14:34 Peter Laul Honorable mentions: Piano Sonata No.1, Piano Sonata No.3, Etude No.3, Etude Op.8 No.2, Etude No.6, Poem tragique, Piano Sonata No.2, Piano Sonata No.4 **PATREON LINK** If you want to support my crippling addiction to making these videos