CD 1:
Piano Sonata No.1 in F minor, Op. 6
Piano Sonata No.2 in G-sharp minor, Op. 19
Piano Sonata No.6, Op. 62
Piano Sonata No.8, Op. 66
Piano Sonata No.9, Op. 68

CD 2:
Piano Sonata No.3 in F-sharp minor, Op. 23
Piano Sonata No.4 in F-sharp major, Op. 30Piano Sonata No.5, Op. 53
Deux Morceaux, op. 57
Feuillet d’album, Op. 58
Piano Sonata No.7, Op. 64
Piano Sonata No.10, Op. 70

Alexander Scriabin’s (1872-1915) piano sonatas offer a uniquely encompassing insight into the composer’s fascinating music and aesthetics, and their development over the span of his creative life. Upon first listening, Scriabin’s piano sonatas seem to be a group of widely different works written in unrelated styles, as if they would be the result of the creative labor of different composers. On closer and repeated listening, however, they emerge as individual crystallized stages in a sweeping process of philosophical and aesthetic metamorphosis a process that encompasses the constraints of the composer’s own condition, his developing musical thought, and his philosophical understanding of the cosmos and his own place in it. Contact with mystic philosophy, namely Theosophy, and with Silver Age Symbolist artists and thinkers was crucial to this development. The wealth of expression contained in Scriabin’s sonatas ranging from the passionate romantic outbursts of the first three, through the flights and ecstatic dances of the middle period’s fourth and fifth, towards the late sonatas’ musical representation of mystical dissolution is, I would dare say, unparalleled in the history of music. This paradox of variety within unity, well enshrined in the mystic philosophy so dear to Scriabin, demands of the pianist (and the public) an intense effort in identifying each sonata’s idiosyncrasies without losing the feeling for the whole.