b'Program NotesAlexander Scriabin(1872-1915)Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor, Op. 20 Composed 1896Alexander Scriabin was born in Moscow, Russia. His father, Nikolai Scriabin, was a lawyer in the Russian consular service and his mother, Lyubov Petrovna Scriabina, was an accomplished concert pianist. As his father was often away on foreign business trips and his mother passed away of tuberculosis just after his first birthday, he was raised by his grandmother, great aunt, and aunt. Although they coddled him beyond reasonable measure, they also strongly encouraged his study of music.He was life-long friends with Sergei Rachmaninoff, alongside whom he studied composition during his teenage years at the Moscow Conservatory. Scriabin enrolled at 16 to study music theory and composition with Sergei Taneyev, a champion of his talents, and Anton Arensky, who had serious doubts about his ability. He also studied piano with Vasily Safonov.Scriabin graduated in 1892 with the second-place medal in piano, not in the slightest a dishonor as Rachmaninoff took first place. He never actually completed his composition degree due to strong personality and musical disagreements with Arensky, whose signature is the only faculty signature missing from his diploma.Scriabins small stature and particularly small hands, which barely stretched an octave, were one of among the main reasons that his career as a concert pianist never really took off like that of his good friend Rachmaninoff. The bulk of his music is for piano, much like Rachmaninoff and Chopin. Early on in his compositional career, he was fascinated by the music of Chopin and he composed in forms similarly seen in the work of his Polish counterpart like polonaises, etudes, preludes, and mazurkas. He later developed his own musical style and identity. His music became very mystical and egocentric, as he developed somewhat of a god complex. His harmonic style became atonal in nature and mostly unintelligiblecertainly well ahead of his time.His Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor, Op. 20 was written in 1896 and premiered in 1897. It was published in 1898, the same year he was appointed to a position on the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. It was his first work for orchestra; although he wrote a Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra, the orchestra part was never realized, and the work remained an un-orchestrated princetonsymphony.org/ 13/ princetonfestival.org'