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Saturday 4 November 3.30pm
Scriabin, his Circle and his Legacy 1

Conway Hall  £7/£4.50 concessions

Jonathan Powell, piano

Programme

Alexander Scriabin Sonata no.7
Samuil Feinberg Sonata no.6
Mikolajus Ciurlionis Preludes
Leonid Sabaneyev Sonata 'in Memory of Scriabin'

Performer

Jonathan Powell, born in 1969 in Lancashire, started playing the piano at the age of six and in 1979 was awarded a choral scholarship to Magdalen College School, Oxford where he made his first concert appearances. He went on to read music at Cambridge University, during which time he gave numerous performances of standard and contemporary repertory including his own compositions. He has since developed a multi-faceted career as a pianist, composer and musicologist. Among the influences on his pianistic development he acknowledges the guidance of Denis Matthews and Sulamita Aronovsky.
At the age of 18 Jonathan Powell became the first pianist ‚ other than the composer himself ‚ to play Michael Finnissy's virtuosic English Country Tunes, at the BMIC in London. The following year he performed the work again, alongside Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram and his own works at the Brighton Festival and at the Dartington Summer School.
In 1990 he made his London debut at the Purcell Room, having been awarded a solo concert in the Park Lane Group's Young Artists series, and gave the world premiËre of Michael Finnissy's Strauss Walzer, receiving great critical acclaim.
While working on a doctorate from the University of Cambridge concerning Skryabin and his influence on Russian music, Jonathan Powell continued his performing career with radio broadcasts and first CD recordings of music by Andrew Toovey and Alexander Krein.
In 1999 he directed and performed in four concerts during the Barbican's St Petersburg festival, and in 2000 he received a diploma in the Second Skryabin International Piano Competition in Moscow, where he performed works by Skryabin, Chopin and Stanchinsky. The arts newspaper Kultura commented that he 'brought unbelievable finesse to his interpretations of Stanchinsky and Skryabin ... and earned the reputation of a great virtuoso'.
Future engagements include a series of concerts in London (playing works by Skryabin and his Russian contemporaries), further recording work including CDs of music by Skryabin, Samuil Feinberg and Sorabji, concert broadcasts of his own work and several appearances in BBC Radio 3's Baltic Festival planned for 2001.

'Jonathan Powell is a serious and challenging young pianist, one whose programme indicated a decisive commitment to the cutting edge of extreme virtuosity, and whose playing was done in a kind of selfless rage, so that the fireworks and the brilliance seemed to come right out of the musical substance ‚ indeed to be necessarily the essence of the musical substance.
'Strongly grasped rhythms, sharp attacks and bright resonances brought a Messiaen-like quality to the later stages of the Emerson movement from Ives's Concord Sonata, and then there were the adamantine performances of Michael Finnissy's Strauss Walzer, a triptych of recently rescued juvenilia, but entirely characteristic of this composer's style of transcription, whereby the original almost disappears into cascading fragments, recollections and complications, glittering in a Ravelian way.
'But Powell's most ferociously gripping performance was of Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram, unless it was simply that this was the most electric of his highly charged choices. Every exploding gesture, every desperate thrill, every silence had a total inevitability, right up to the wavering reverberation of the finish. Finally, there was Nancarrow's early Sonatina, demanding, and here receiving, the alacrity and dispassion of a human machine.'
Paul Griffiths, The Times

'With Powell, we get to experience a revelation. The vitality and finely judged tonal colouration of his playing allow us to understand how Skryabin did open up an entirely distinctive and novel sense of beauty.... This sonata is the greatest of Krein's piano works. We are in Powell's debt for this presentation.'
David Shields, Billboard

Notes

Scriabin, his Circle and his Legacy Boris Pasternak described the beginning of the 20th century as the "era of Scriabin", the composer who, for the "poets and thinkers of the Russian avant garde had been a prophet, his art a revelation". Scriabin's influence on Russian composers of the early 20th century was as strong as it was on symbolist poets such as Vyacheslav Ivanov and Konstantin Balmont. The clearest demonstration of this is the fact that many composers simply imitated Scriabin, his later style in particular. Indeed, Scriabin's influence was so pervasive that he not only served as a direct model from which less individual composers could copy, but also held a fascination for the more outstanding composers. The concerts that will take place on the 4 November will demonstrate the relation between Scriabin's music and that of Russian, Lithuanian and Jewish composers active during the period 1907-25. They will explore the music of Scriabin's close circle of friends such as the sonata by Alexander Krein written in 1922 for Heinrich Neuhaus, and the sonata written in memory of Scriabin in 1915 by Leonid Sabaneyev, Scriabin's first biographer. Also included are works by the painter-composer Mikolajus Ciurlionis, a Lithuanian who when living in Russia created a great sensation among the Russian symbolist community. Feinberg and Stanchinsky were both young men when they met Scriabin: when the 23-year-old Feinberg performed Scriabin's Fourth Sonata, its composer pronounced him the most adept performer of that work. His subsequent outstanding career as a pianist overshadowed his work as a composer that was dogged by political difficulties; his Sixth Sonata is a towering achievement. When Stanchinsky played some of his own works to Scriabin (who was routinely intolerant of his contemporaries' work), almost uniquely, Stanchinsky was encouraged by the older composer. Stanchinsky died tragically at the age of 26, having crossed an icy river in order to join a monastic community in rural Russia. Nikolay Obukhov left Russia in 1915, the year he wrote Icons, three short but strikingly unusual pieces. He combined a proto-serial method with religious mysticism in a manner comparable to Scriabin. The influence of Scriabin continued to be a dominant force in Russian music throughout the 1920s. Alexey Melkikh's lyrical Sonata-Nocturne is one of the more poignant examples of the many sonatas written in Scriabin's wake.