Scriabin/Nemtin - Mysterium 

Can you imagine, Skryabin dedicated it it to my parents and to my birth in CCCP! And Russian people dont know that yet. That is incredible, thank you, we love that you love Alexander Skryabin’s music! We also love it! I’m Princess born in the CCCP. I’m looking for lawyer as I cant get my salary from APPLE since 1977. Apple made Apple logo from my face when from my VI month old photo and Putin and Medvedev preferred to kill STEVE JOBS in CA and my parents in Russia, instead of getting me have my APPLE LOGO SALARY. I met Steve Jobs before he died and he said I must get my salary, but I’m from Russia and I dont have lawyer. If you or your other friends can help me to find lawyer to contact Tim Cook about my salary, Alexander Skryabin would thank you a lot! Vera Petrovna Svechina.

​@@verasvechinaYou are a poet.

@@Barichter74318yes wow

amazing. the rehearsals for this must have been wild. can I ask you how much time the orchestra dedicate to this, from first rehearsal to the performance?

❤

I had always envisioned this massive work fitted to that sorts of scenes. Imagine the bellicose and combative second movement paired to Star War and the meditative and chilling third movement paired to Event Horizon!

Scriabin was influenced by theosophical movement and you description is amazingly right - google it - you will be surprised how close you are apart from the orthodox thing

The only other composer I know who compose on such a cosmic scale is Mahler. But even in his cosmicity he somewhat manage to stay very intimate. Scriabin in the contrary is completely out there, haha.

@@guillaumebriand8961 I disagree with Mahler. He sounds self-pitying to my ears, trapped in his ego. Stockhausen achieved something with his huge cycle Licht (light) that appears to me as the fulfilment of the vision Scriabin had and couldn't complete due to his early death.

song?

Clearly the world would have ended

Saaaaame. Just started becoming obsessed with Scriabin.

@@FesteringGhoul I have changed my mind though. Nemtin doesn't do Scriabin justice and doesn't understand Scriabin's harmony. He kind of goes off the rails and doesn't stay true to Scriabin's harmonic rules. Scriabin's harmonic rules are actually really normal and basically the same as the romantic music before him. He just implements them in a slightly different way. A lot of this is a bit more avant-garde. Take 15:41. The piano part is literally lifted from a Scriabin piece (can't remember which off the top of my head) but the strings playing alongside it show no respect for the existing harmonic structure of the piano part... You can't just add unrelated dissonances to Scriabin because that's literally atonal and Scriabin is anything but atonal. Why do the strings play those specific tones? There is no good reason. Nemtin is just throwing around notes for no reason. Also, the form is not as cohesive as Scriabin's form.

@@mysterium364Well uhh I personally will disagree on this take. First of all, Scriabin IS atonal beginning with his "second period" (you actually need a tonic to define tonality and since his works beginning with this period are mostly dissonant chord progressions without any specific relations or stable triads/roots - you can't define a tonality. You can't take A11-F9-C7 progression that doesn't resolve anywhere and define tonality. You can try to do it Hindemith way and try to define a tonal center, but uhhh... Good luck with that lol :D Also calling mid to late Scriabin's harmony ROMANTIC is a sin brother, it has more in common with jazz than with guys like, I dunno, Brahms, Medtner or Chopin :D) Second thing is that I think Nemtin did Scriabin's harmony justice, since he is quite known for his Nuances being the best attempt so far at orchestrating Scriabin's piano works (there is Haas's 9th sonata rendition but I personally find it quite lacking). And you can't do a good orchestration if you don't understand how composer's harmonic and orchestral language works. This particular abomination sounds like Prometheus like almost all the time, just with different leitmotifs and harmonies. Also, as I mentioned - Scriabin is atonal and a lot of his works also include quite spicy dissonant chords (op.74, White Mass sonata and bunch of others), which may sound ESPECIALLY spicy depending on how you orchestrate them. One chord played by piano and a chord played by a ginormous orchestra WILL sound different, because, yk, physics and such things. Third thing, I personally wouldn't consider this work as a work by Scriabin at all, imo it should be positioned like "Poeme on themes and philosophic views of Scriabin" or smth, variations, tribute, whatevs, but not as a "Scriabin's unfinished masterpiece completed by Nemtin". Nah, you just can't take 25 or smth pages of sketches and turn them into a "completed work" by someone who was dead for a long time by that moment of time xd ANYWAYS, if you ever come across this being played live I highly recommend to go just because it sounds dope and is like a giant room full of easter eggs. Nemtin loved our guy Scriabin no less than we do so yeah xD have a nice one pal

@@Dirtybudus Jazz is a separate art form from classical, not a harmonic style. It is possible for jazz to be completely atonal or to have extremely limited and traditional harmony. Nuances is lifted mostly note for note from Scriabin. This sounds nothing like Prometheus. Scriabin was very rarely (maybe even never) dissonant. A tonal center is an abstract concept that flies out the window as soon as modulation is involved. To argue about whether or not Scriabin was atonal is a semantics argument, and I would argue that it is better to throw out the "tonal center" requirement than to lump this in with music which contains no harmonic structure whatsoever. When talking about Sonata 7, I assume you refer to the repeated major/minor chords at the beginning. Those aren't dissonant. Notice how the major seventh intervals are always organized such that they are clearly composed of a major fifth plus a major third. It is a common misconception that all major seventh intervals are dissonant.

​@@mysterium364 1) How is jazz a "different art form"? It's not like jazz is architecture now, innit? It still follows the rules of classic harmony, with all the consonant and dissonant relations, "tension and release" strats and so on. 2) "Nuances is lifted mostly note for note from Scriabin", yeah, just as I stated in my previous response it's literally an ORCHESTRATION of Scriabin's works. Literally. It even tells you the original pieces he used in the sheet music. Because he never claimed it was his original work. Same like when Franck's sonata was transcribed for multitude of different instruments that are not violin, no one claimed that it was their original work, same with Nemtin, it's just an orchestration. 3) Alright man, you gotta decide which side are you on. You are now claiming that Scriabin was never dissonant, but in the previous response you stated that his harmony is the same harmony which the late romantic era composers used. By that measure Scriabin's choice of harmony is not only extremely dissonant, but also heretical. :D Sorry, you can't just say his harmony is romantic and then proceed to convince anyone that major 7th or minor 9th is not "dissonant" and that's just a misconception of harmony. Also, the beginning of 7th sonata is not major/minor or whatever, since it IS atonal, but his beloved octatonic scale layed out as a chord. Which was his, probably, favorite way of building his music. "Grab a scale, lay it out as a chord, et voila - you have yourself a nice harmony AND melody". 4) "A tonal center is an abstract concept that flies out the window as soon as modulation is involved." Yeah, I literally said that it was pointless, duh. 5) "This sounds nothing like Prometheus". Nah, the instrumentation is very Scriabinesque. Maybe not in the part 2 or 3, where it really is starting to go sideways and sound more like Nemtin himself would like it to sound, but in general... Nah, pretty much Prometheus with different themes and harmonies built on different root notes. Especially in the climaxes, when the organ, choir and tutti kick in. Also, again, imo it's not an attempt to impersonate Scriabin, it's just a wicked simulation of "how it could be if it would be", by a guy that studied his music pretty much all of his life and dedicated a lot of time and effort into it. 6) And the last bit - "...than to lump this in with music which contains no harmonic structure whatsoever" Now that is what I call a misconception. Atonal basically means "without tonality and all the functions that tonality brings - cadences, chord relations, resolves etc." You know, all the basic stuff in diatonic music. A lot of musicologists even consider Chopin's 2nd sonatas Finale atonal, and it was way before Schoenberg and his 12tone shenanigans. But even then, you can call all the chords in 12tone and later post-tonal works harmonies, they are just not functional. The bottom line is (please read this part, aight?). Nemtin was a smart and educated fella and he loved Scriabin, so he did the prefatory action based of his knowledge about Scriabin's ways and made an educated guess on how things could possibly go. As I said before, this should be named "Prefatory action; a ginormous fantasy on Scriabin's themes and ideas by Nemtin" and then it'd make perfect sense. Also, would be a cool way to get a Phd in music :DD Cya

Eh bien, il a organisé des esquisses bien incomplètes, développé, pas exactement inventé, mais il s'est enfoncé dans ce monde et nous a donné quelque chose d'unique, un Scriabine imaginé, reconstruit, fabriqué mais avec un énorme sympathie pour ce compositeur qu'il connaissait a fond.

No, there have been many performances before. The first movement is performed the most often, and even the complete three movements have been performed in Netherland prior to this one at least twice, not to mention the one Ashkenazy conducted. Then, there was a Russian performance back in 2015 (in 2015 there were 2 performances, one in Russia and another in Netherland, cuz it was some anniversary of Scriabin). So this is probably the 4th recorded performance of the complete 3 movements. There was a performance of the latter two (?) movements in San Francisco last century but I am not sure if there was any recording. I have the recordings from the said 2 performances back in 2015 and another 2004 recording in Netherlands. IMO the 2004 performance is the best.

@@Jazzzzzzzxxxzz I stand corrected. By the way, I wonder if anybody's going to upload that 2004 Netherlands performance of Mysterium; that would be one helluva listen to sit through, and a very surreal one at that! :^D

@@KevinTheSkullAnderson I can do a private upload and set a password. But I haven't figure out how to upload mp3 directly. I hate coupling with pictures

@@Jazzzzzzzxxxzz, that is a great idea. I'm glad that we share similar tastes in the realm of present-day classical music -- and, by present-day, I mean anything made after 1970 (or some stuff like that, I dunno).

@@KevinTheSkullAnderson Welcome - I am actually really busy for the first four months of the year so you can pin me again in May and maybe we can figure out a way to do it.

No. My wife was singing in the choir. We are hungarians.

Wow. Sublime! What I wouldn't give to attend a performance like that! Scriabin had access to a different plane of consciousness. I think it'll take at least a few hundred years more before people begin to grasp the scope of such brilliance! I'm Canadian, but I think Russian composers rock - other Western composers have never surpassed them!

When he looses his conventional mind to gain a totally different one which doesn't need to copy anything around it because its creations are made by itself

@@danielfeygin1216 Scriabin's career as a pianist was being wonderfully received around the time he was composing Mysterium.

I've never understood people like yourself who appear to take pride in telling about how ignorant you are.

Sad comment