Valerie Tryon and the piano music she loves
“Scriabin, he was crazy, you know.”
So recalled concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz in a mid-1980s interview filmed in his Manhattan townhouse, replete with his imitation of pianist-composer Alexander Scriabin’s facial tics, footage of which was included in the posthumous1993 documentary, “Vladimir Horowitz: A Reminiscence.”
Horowitz was a lad of either 10 or 11 when he played for Scriabin in 1914, a year before the latter succumbed to septicemia at the age of 43. That meeting had been facilitated by his uncle, Alexander Horowitz, a student of Scriabin and a piano professor at the Kharkov (Kharkiv) Conservatory.
By that time, the Moscow-born Scriabin had made a name for himself as a composer and a touring concert pianist throughout his native Russia, Europe and the United States. Yet that image, or rather that myth of Scriabin as a complete nutter, not only dogged the composer during his last years, but has also been one aspect of his legacy.
However, that never prevented conductors such as Leopold Stokowski, Riccardo Muti, Jerzy Semkow, Leif Segerstam and Valery Gergiev, among others, from programming Scriabin’s orchestral works, even though they do require large orchestras with a crackerjack string section.
And that never prevented legions of pianists such as Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Sofronitsky, Gilels, Richter, Ashkenazy, Sokolov, Zhukov, Pletnev, Kissin and Trifonov, or their Western counterparts such as Ogdon, Woodward, Ohlsson and Laredo, plus Canadians such as Glenn Gould, Anton Kuerti and Marc-André Hamelin from performing Scriabin, even though traversals of the last four of his 10 piano sonatas can be akin to a taking a walk on the wild side.
As for Horowitz, he had a lifelong passion for Scriabin’s music, even trotting out encores chosen from the composer’s early period, which drew on the pianistic heritage of Chopin and Liszt, such as the wistful “Prelude for left hand alone” op. 9 no. 1, the “Étude No. 1 in C-sharp Minor” op. 2 which he’d played countless times including for the 1985 documentary “The Last Romantic,” and the virtuosic “Étude in D-sharp Minor” op. 8 no. 12.
You can hear those very three Scriabin pieces performed by Valerie Tryon at the conclusion of her annual Valentine’s recital on Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts, 126 James St. S.
Tryon, too, has had a decades-long love of Scriabin’s music.
“I have played about five of the sonatas,” said Tryon from her Ancaster home. “These preludes and etudes, I’ve done odds and ends. I used to play them for recitals during my time in England.”
Not that playing Scriabin is a walk in the park.
“One problem is the stretches,” said Tryon. “He must have had a big hand.”
Tryon’s fans will recall that in 2019, just days before one of her Valentine’s recitals, she slipped on ice and broke her left wrist.
“I can’t stretch a 10th in my left hand anymore, which I could before,” admitted Tryon.
So, just how will she fare in the “Prelude for left hand alone?”
“It’s very tricky, we’ll find out,” she chuckled.
Tryon has previously performed the “Nocturne,” which is the companion piece in op. 9. However, at the moment it doesn’t look as though that movement will be on this program.
“I’ve somehow lost this music,” she confessed. “I’ll dig it up somewhere.”
As Horowitz proved time and again over his career, Tryon also recognizes that there needs to be a rhetorical liberty when performing Scriabin’s piano music.
“You need to be extremely free,” explained Tryon. “I think you can’t be too rigid with him. You have to have all your phrases to go somewhere and allow all kinds of licences which you dare not with anyone else.”
Similar to many of Tryon’s previous Valentine’s recitals, this one is filled with music she loves.
She’ll open with three sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, K. 29, K. 8 and K. 159 and follow them with Beethoven’s “32 Variations on an original theme.”
“I haven’t played Beethoven for a long time,” said Tryon. “The ‘32 Variations’ is something I’ve known since I was at the (Royal) Academy (of Music in London). It’s such a minute theme, really. There’s nothing much there, but I can’t believe how many variations he puts on that with such interest.”
She’ll close the first half with three of Liszt’s “Consolations” S. 172, No. 3 — a Horowitz favourite by the way — Nos. 5 and 6, and top them off with the devilishly difficult “Mephisto Waltz No. 1.”
After the interval, it’ll be Ravel’s lovely “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” and “Ondine” from “Gaspard de la nuit.”
Two selections by Tchaikovsky will precede her Scriabin set, “June: Barcarolle” from “The Seasons” and the “Dumka” op. 59, subtitled “Scène rustique russe.”
“I love Russian music,” professed Tryon. “I mean, let’s face it. Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky. Scriabin. Prokofiev. Shostakovich. I mean, you can’t beat that team, can you?”
Tickets at hcadancetheatre.com or call 905-528-4020: $30, senior/ arts worker $25, student $15.
Saturday at 3 p.m. in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, 320 Charlton Ave. W., Hammer Baroque presents “Rossi of Mantua: the Songs of Salamone” with the Toronto-based Diapente Renaissance Quintet performing sacred and secular vocal music by the Jewish Venetian composer Salamone Rossi and his contemporaries. Suggested donation: $15.
Feb. 16 at 6:30 p.m. in the Playhouse Cinema, 177 Sherman Ave. N., Ted Harms’s VOC Silent Film Harmonic improvises a musical soundtrack to “A Page of Madness,” Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 silent film with English subtitles. Tickets at playhousecinema.ca: $18.75.