Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Scriabin was born into a noble family in Moscow and received his early musical training at the hands of the fearsome but revered piano teacher Nikolai Zverev. Initially, he made a professional reputation as a virtuoso pianist but after catching the ear of the music publisher Mitrofan Belaieff, he found a growing audience for his highly imaginative piano miniatures, as well as larger works such as his Piano Concerto (1896/7) and his three large-scale symphonies - composed between 1900 and 1904, and culminating in the massive Third (The Divine Poem). By now, his imagination was beginning to move in ever more fantastical regions, and while he continued to compose supercharged, harmonically daring piano miniatures (including Etudes, Preludes and Mazurkas in the tradition of his beloved Chopin) he turned increasingly to the occult and mystical preoccupations of Imperial Russia's "silver age". Two single-movement symphonies (The Poem of Ecstasy - 1907 and Prometheus - 1910) and a series of ten visionary, virtuosic Piano Sonatas (1892-1913) remain among the most challenging and original achievements of Russian late romanticism as it teetered on the cusp of modernism. His final project was an apocalyptic (and probably unperformable) performance-art piece called Mysterium; it remained incomplete when Scriabin died, suddenly, of blood poisoning, aged just 43.