Mission impossible?

Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday, the autograph score of the piece was beamed on to the wall behind him. It was just a glimpse —- but enough to show us that Scriabin had the most beautiful musical calligraphy of any composer since Bach.

On the face of it, that’s surprising. You would expect the Cantor of St Thomas’s to inscribe neatly — and indeed baroque musicians often play Bach straight from his own manuscripts, preening as they do so. But Scriabin is often regarded as a messy composer, in thrall to the mystical fads of pre-revolutionary Russia. So you might envisage a scrawl covered in ink blots and frenzied crossings-out.

It’s true that Scriabin’s mysticism hasn’t aged well; nor have his laborious attempts to link every tone in the chromatic scale to a specific colour and emotion. But this doesn’t make his piano music messy. If the chords sound clotted and the musical argument incoherent, blame the pianist.

The sonatas, written between 1892 and 1913, move rapidly from conventional late romanticism to dissonant experiments touched with hysteria. Yet even the spookiest effects are the product of rigorous method rather than madness.

To quote the Scriabin scholar Simon Nicholls, the composer’s ‘voice-leading and harmony were impeccably logical at all stages in his development’. Hence the graceful pen strokes of his finished manuscripts, works of arts in their own right. This ‘slender exactitude’, says Nicholls, ‘makes it clear to the interpreter that a similar clarity, precision and grace is demanded in his or her own performance — something extremely difficult to achieve.’

I wasn’t expecting Donohoe to pull it off. He became a bit of a celebrity in 1982, when he won the silver medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition — a triumph missing from the detailed CV provided for the Scriabin.