A SCRIABIN RECITAL
If anyone could have converted me to Scriabin it should have been Mr. Edward Mitchell, who gave a whole afternoon of his works on January 17th at the Westminster Central Hall, ranging from Op. 8 to Op. 72. Mr. Mitchell is a player of extraordinary persuasiveness. He evidently understands Scriabin, and is determined to make his audience understand him. He has a very efficient and vigorous technique, and plays with remarkable accuracy and assurance. No one could listen to his programme without learning a great deal about the composer to whom it was devoted. Yet in spite of a very well-chosen selection of pieces, in spite of considerable variety of touch and style, the concert left only an impression of deadly and morbid monotony. An afternoon of Scriabin recalled at once to memory the effect of a concert of Hugo Wolf's songs, or of Elgar's The Apostles. It was morbid and narcotic, a perpetual command to abrogate reason and abandon one's brain to feeling, to emotion, to a mystical trance. The emotional force of such music is at times undeniable; what it sets out to achieve, the representation of moods and emotions, it achieves overwhelmingly. Scriabin has in the main three moods, a mood of violence and pain, a mood of comatose oppression, and a mood of struggle, the last of which is well illustrated by Vers la flamme. Perhaps this is all that some people require of music. Others demand a sense of dignity and nobility, with a conscious beauty of formal design.
Technically Scriabin can be summed up in a few words. His outlook on music is purely harmonic. Even in his early works he shows a partiality for certain well-known discords which he gradually comes to use so often that the resolution of them becomes superfluous. By this road we lead on to Stravinsky, Casella, and Malipiero. Melodic tone there is none. This melodic poverty is very apparent and easily demonstrable in the early works. Here Scriabin is obviously building, or trying to build, on Chopin. But while comparing Scriabin with Chopin, compare Chopin with Field. Chopin is clearly an advance on Field in every way—he has a much stronger melodic line, and a much deeper sense of harmonic values. But Scriabin is no advance on Chopin, only a retrogression from him. He can only imitate Chopin's emotional climaxes. He appears to be more interesting harmonically, because he keeps Chopin's discords and omits his concords, roughly speaking.