Bold Tendencies: Poems of Ecstasy and Fire

Programme

Visionary composer Alexander Scriabin began his break with all musical conventions at least a decade before the advances of Stravinsky. He wrote very few orchestral works, but they included these two massive one-movement symphonies. Poem of Ecstasy was much loved by Henry Miller, who said that the work put him in a trance, as “…like a bath of ice, cocaine and rainbows.”

Poem of Fire is dedicated to Prometheus, god of fire and creator of the mortal world. Its mystical rhythms, played by an orchestra of 85 musicians, suggest the presence of the human dancing to the rhythms of the cosmos. Scriabin incorporated a ‘keyboard for lights’ to bathe the performance space in a vast interplay of coloured lights together with the strikingly original, supercharged sound world of the music. The piece is rarely performed with its lighting instructions and we will follow Scriabin’s own notes to create his original vision.