The Performing Style of Alexander Scriabin (review)

Aleksandr Scriabin has enjoyed a healthy degree of interest among musicologists and theorists alike in the almost one hundred years since his death, although his music is still much maligned and underplayed in the concert hall. Nevertheless, it is typically the weirdness of his cosmogony, the eccentricities of his personality, or the uniqueness of his harmonic vocabulary that attracts significant scholarly commentary. A fact that seems to be forgotten is that he first achieved worldwide renown as a pianist. Indeed, attention is seldom focused on the talent that made him an idolized and revered pianist in his time by audiences and colleagues alike. In light of this, Leikin’s work should be warmly welcomed for its promise to delineate the performance practices of one of Russia’s greatest pianists.

Leikin’s primary source material is the piano rolls Scriabin recorded for the firms Hupfeld Phonola and Welte-Mignon. His transcriptions of several of these (amounting to almost 180 pages of the book and divided into chapters 3 and 4, one chapter per firm) contain three levels: a tempo graph, the music as Scriabin played it, and the music as it was published, which Ashgate has gone to great lengths to reproduce. These provide plenty of food for thought for modern performers of Scriabin. He also makes reference to documentary sources describing Scriabin’s pianism in all its colorful detail. It is a well-known fact that there are obvious problems involved in dealing with recollections and reviews and also with such inferior recording technology: these may provide only a vague and imprecise account of performance qualities. This is the main reason why early recordings of classical music repertoire have previously been ascribed little value and have been deemed rather inconsequential as primary source material. Leikin handles these obstacles with skill by providing a comprehensive account of the strengths and weaknesses of and differences between the two firms’ systems and a clever corroboration of the audio experience with documented testimony (see chap. 1, “The Music of Scriabin: Then and Now,” in particular the section “Scriabin’s Reproducing Pianos: The Phonola and the Welte-Mignon”). He also does not shy away from highlighting infidelities of the recording process that may have undeservedly lent Scriabin’s pianism more authority and garnered him more admiration than he should have been accorded (see pp. 11, 135–37, 151).

From the outset, Leikin expresses his indebtedness to the Scriabin enthusiast, sound engineer, pianist, and player pianist Pavel Lobanov, whose study A. N. Skriabin—iinterpretator svoikh kompozitsii [Moscow: Iris-Press, 1995] forms the basis of Leikin’s transcription methodology and from which he borrows and extrapolates to arrive at his conclusions. Lobanov was a student of acclaimed Russian pianist Vladimir Sofronitskii (son-in-law of Scriabin himself and arguably the most praised interpreter of his music since the composer and Vsevolod Buyukli), and it is evident to anyone who knows his work on Scriabin, despite its commitment and integrity, that Lobanov was given to the cult-like devotion that both his teacher and his teacher’s father-in-law attracted during their respective lifetimes. This bias appears to shine through into Leikin’s work as well when he valorizes a bit uncritically at the outset the “rare opportunity of perusing and even playing through Scriabin’s documented interpretations of his own music” (p. xi), and when Leikin paraphrases, also at the outset and a bit uncritically, the hyperbolic remarks of various early critics. It should be said that Leikin successfully avoids tainting his scholarship—his reconstruction methodology and analyses—with such bias, although the broader point to and significance of such detailed analyses of Scriabin’s pianism are insufficiently examined. Indeed, while Leikin’s study examining Scriabin’s pianistic skills stands alone on its own merits, I believe a holistic approach to Scriabin’s idiosyncratic pianism requires its contextualization within the extramusical currents which influenced and shaped it. Leikin does indeed allude to this at several points in the...