In 1898 Scriabin composed his Third Sonata depicting a soul’s journey, “[free and wild, through a whirlpool of suffering and seas of feeling.]” With successive works, his spiritual explorations reached new heights, culminating in his ‘Insect’ Sonata (No. 10), which he imbued with the “ceaseless activity, fluttering, illumination, and seduction” of insects, imagining them as potent symbols of enlightenment.

In this program, Scriabin joins with contemporary oracles Unsuk Chin and Lizzy Younan: Chin eliciting in her etudes Scriabinesque bursts of dazzling colour, while Younan embarks on her own scouring of the soul, depicted successively as a “malfunctioning joy machine,” “psychotic puppet,” “ecstatic joy,” “inward energy ready to burst,” and finally “filled with tension and painful longing.”

Our program ends with our old friend J.S. Bach, who, without any need for pyrotechnics or ecstatic transportation, readily helps us to alight from our journey in a partita of play and joy.