Scriabin Sonata No.4 (Orchestration, arr. Caleb Hu)

Scriabin's Fourth Piano Sonata is one of the most iconic and oft-played works in his oeuvre—and for good reason, as in a mere 8 minutes it manages to create an entire world. The word of the day is color. Scriabin, the synesthete, did not write music as much as he painted music. The work is abound with coloristic effects of all kinds, overlaying a richly Romantic, highly chromatic, and strongly melodic tonal palette which occasionally dips its feet into tonal ambiguity. The form of this sonata is fairly traditional, albeit highly compressed and with slight irregularities. The first movement depicts a star in the sky, mysterious and gleaming from far away—the speaker becomes intoxicated by its beauty and tormented with desire for its light. The constantly yearning melody and tonally ambiguous harmonies represent this unfulfilled desire. This movement is more or less in the ABA form of an aria and functions not as a standalone movement but as an intro to the second movement, much like the introduction to Schuman's Sonata No.1. In the second movement, the speaker obsessively leaps towards the star, eventually being engulfed by its light. The main theme undergoes a remarkable number of transformations, demonstrating Scriabin's mastery of traditional forms and motivic development. And the theme of the first movement is recalled at climactic points in the second, the same way the introductory theme comes back in Schumann's sonata. Comparisons can be drawn with Impressionism and Wagner. The initial establishment of a tonally ambiguous chords that don't resolve until an ecstatic (and some say erotic) climax is very much Tristan-esque. So are the constant leaps of the primary motifs between different tonalities, never seeming to really settle on one key until the last minute or so. I found Scriabin's 4th Sonata very difficult to orchestrate, because of the large variety of largely pianistic textures compressed into such a short amount of time. However, I'm pretty happy with the results and to the best of my knowledgeable, it's actually playable. Unlike some other orchestrations out there, I've kept it in the original key of F# major which just sounds "right". I totally get why someone else would transpose it though because F# is horrific to read in, and far from an ideal key for string players. Andante 0:00 A section 0:46 B section 1:30 A section Volando 2:54 Exposition, Theme I 3:29 Theme II 4:01 Closing material 4:15 Development 5:13 Recapitulation 7:01 Coda