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From
Russia with ardour
Pianist Sabrina Avantario devotes a remarkable recital to Skrjabin's memory on a
concert within the Slavia Festival in Bologna on 11 November
A
review by Caterina Criscione, in Piano Time, January 1996
Slavia
Festival is an event linked to the
outstanding calendar of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, and one of the
very few events specifically devoted to Russian composers in Italy .
From 11 November to 16 December, six concerts arranged with AGIMUS of Bologna
paid homage to the most famous Russian musicians between 19th and 20th centuries,
among whom Skrjabin, Rimskij Korsakov, Cajkovskij, Ljadov, Prokof'ev, Balakierv,
but also to some less known ones, as Akimenko or Ukrainian Ljatosinskij and
Sillinger.
This year, the opening concert of the second edition, given by pianist Sabrina
Avantario at the Sala Mozart of the Accademia Filarmonica, was dedicated to the
memory of Aleksander Skrjabin. And not only to his memory, but also to the
memory of his family and to some contemporary composers who took inspiration
from Skrjabin for their compositions, as Czech Lubos Fiser, who wrote a Sonata
upon the theme of Skrjabin's Tenth Sonata in 1969, or 29-year-old Andrea Musizza
from Trieste, with his brief Omaggio a Skrjabin (1994). Alexander Skrjabin's
music is fascinating: he could renew the Chopinian-Romantic mark of the piano
language from the inside, by enriching it of an original tone-colouring and
harmonic insight, of a voluptuousness forerunning the 20th century
and which the Moscovite musician did not delay in expressing: in some
early works as Canon, written at the age of just eleven, or in the Three pieces
op.2 and in some Mazurkas (1889) - performed at the beginning of the concert -
it is possible to perceive the affinities with, and also the
new suggestiveness of the Romantic piano, with
perfect formal clarity and simplicity of starting-points. As soon as he
was a teen-ager, Skrjabin had already found his way . It is delighfully
extraordinary to discover as even his son Julian, who unfortunately died at the
age of eleven (he was drowned in river Dnepr in the summer 1919) , had already
revealed his talent as a composer, in
his father's footsteps: his Prelude op.2, the Preludes op.3 and the last one
composed in 1919 (a few months before death) are rich in impetuousness, of
expressive spontaneity and harmonious research. These works were born in their
age and made of critical - but in a way as dreamy -
reaction to the tonal language , and they would thoroughly deserve to be
included in the concert repertoire. Sabrina Avantario continued her well-thought
recital with the Omaggio a Skrjabin by Musizza - who mainly takes inspiration
from the colours and the technical features of the Skrjabinian language -
, with Fiser's Sonata, passing also through another series of works by
Skrjabin's. The interesting cycle was closed by the two Poems op. 32 of 1903,
the second of which had already been conceived by the musician during his
adolescence for a lyrical opera which was never found.
Caterina Criscione
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