The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore ed. by Lincoln Ballard and Matthew Bengtson (review)

The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore is a beautifully written and comprehensive tour de force, capturing Aleksandr Niko-layevich Scriabin's life and music from both historical and performance perspectives. Its authors are a musicologist (Lincoln Ballard) and a professional pianist (Matthew Bengtson), who provide expert commentary and discussion of the historical significance of Scriabin as a composer, pianist, and mystic. The book is a hefty tome of over four hundred pages, organized in three parts with thorough notes and an extensive bibliography. Further, this book is an especially valuable resource for performers for its breadth and depth of discussion of specific works, their performance history, and recommended (great) recordings.

The first chapter (pp. 1–12) serves as an introduction, which focuses on the enigma surrounding Scriabin's life and music within and outside Russia. This chapter then provides a much-needed backdrop for the rest of the book, which addresses these points from both historical and musical perspectives. Part 1, entitled "Encountering Scriabin," is subdivided into three chapters (chaps. 2–4). Ballard does a terrific job contextualizing Scriabin's life and music in proto-Soviet and Soviet times (pp. 28–30). He especially focuses on the reception of Scriabin's music and its ultimate dissemination outside Russia. The subsequent two chapters within this part (chaps. 3 and 4) provide superb overviews of Scriabin's solo piano music and orchestral works. These compositions are arranged by genre (mazurkas, etudes, etc.), offering a great ease in navigating these works.

Further, these two chapters are important for two reasons: (1) following brief discussions of each work, Ballard provides a wonderful list of recommended recordings; and (2) within the discussion of these works, especially the orchestral pieces, he brilliantly contextualizes them by including information on their premieres and conductors who championed and promoted Scriabin's music. Such an example is Russian émigré Serge Koussevitzky, whose premieres of Scriabin's orchestral works were quite positively received in Russia and initially in the US after Koussevitzky became principal conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. One of the most notable Boston performances, of Scriabin's Poema e˙kstaza (Poem of Ecstasy), was so enchanting that it received rave reviews from Olin Downes, the New York Times music critic (p. 108). But the association soured shortly afterwards. Ballard beautifully describes this complicated, often tumultuous relationship between Koussevitzky and Scriabin.

There is one discrepancy in this section, however, concerning Scriabin's so-called "proto-serialism," that constitutes a deep misconception about Scriabin's compositional style, especially in his late works, opera 59–74, which dispose of key signatures. The idea echoed musical ideals of the time, especially in the post–World War II era, during which theorists attempted to measure the legitimacy of Scriabin's compositional style against the compositional styles of the Second Viennese School. At the end of his article "Scriabin's Self-Analyses" (Music Analysis 3, no. 2 [July 1984]: 101–22), George Perle bluntly articulates this idea by concluding that had Scriabin lived beyond 1915, he would have achieved a Schoenbergian dodecaphony. This is false, of course, as a great deal of analytical work on Scriabin's late works gives no indication that Scriabin was even remotely interested in twelve-tone music. Ballard should have been more critical of such scholarship and underlined this faulty conception.

Part 2, subdivided into four chapters (chaps. 5–8), focuses largely on extra-musical factors surrounding Scriabin and his music. Chapter 5 offers wonderful anecdotes from performers reminiscing about their experiences in playing Scriabin's works, including a very vibrant account from Vladimir Horowitz (pp. 114–15). It then turns to musicologists and biographers who have written about Scriabin's eccentric character and the so-called "madness" (p. 113). Highlighted in this book is one of the most prominent biographers and close Scriabin...