Aleksandr Nikolaevich Scriabin: Preludes in Gb & Eb min, Op. 11, Nos 13/14 - Played by the Composer

Since Scriabin was born in 1872 (Western Calendar), we thought we should upload his Hupfeld music roll recordings to the internet before his 150th anniversary expires. On 27 January 1908 the composer recorded fourteen rolls for the Ludwig Hupfeld company in Leipzig, initially published in the 73-note Phonola series, with serial numbers from M13426 to M13439. By the time of the Hupfeld General 73-note Catalogue of September 1912, the main classical series was already up to M14779, so one must assume that the Scriabin rolls were first published a good two or three years before that date.

Hupfeld was able to record notes, and presumably pedalling, as its pianists played, but It is not clear that it had any sophisticated method of recording dynamics. Certainly in its earliest recording correspondence, from late 1905 onwards, it asked pianists to send dynamic indications by mail, after their recording sessions were over. What that means - an annotated score, written explanations or descriptions - is anyone's guess. There was a dynamic recording patent taken out in 1906 in Leipzig, by Walter Bernhard, which looks vaguely similar to the written description of Hupfeld's practices provided by Ludwig Riemann in his 1911 book, "Das Wesen des Klavierklanges", but in 1906 Bernhard was working for Hugo Popper, an important music retailer in Leipzig who was facilitating recordings for the Welte-Mignon, manufactured by Hupfeld's main competitors. If you are interested in such details, you can find articles on Dynamic Recording for the Reproducing Piano in some of the later issues of the Pianola Journal, which are all available for free download at our website, on the Journal pages of http://www.pianola.org.

In Scriabin's case it is mainly rolls without automatic dynamic coding which have survived, and it makes sense to use those and to do the best one can to provide a sympathetic portrait of this most intimate of pianists. Once all twelve videos have been uploaded (the two rolls each of Sonatas 2 and 3 are each presented as one video), then they will be included as a playlist, in alphabetical order of title. Each video contains the same detailed scrolling credit at the end, but you don't have to read it every time! It seemed better to include it in each video, since one never knows how visitors to our channel will have discovered it.

Grateful thanks are due to a number of musicians, academics and enthusiasts, as follows:

The late William Candy, professional player-pianist for Hupfeld in London

The late Pavel Lobanov of the Scriabin Museum in Moscow

Anatole Leikin, Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Simon Nicholls, Co-Chairman of the Scriabin Association

Denis Hall and Adrian Church of the Pianola Institute

The rolls used for these video recordings all come from a later 88-note edition published by Hupfeld in the early 1920s, with different serial numbers - all listed during the course of each video. They currently belong to Rex Lawson, who was given them over forty years ago by Bill Candy, mentioned above, along with many other rolls from the Aeolian Company, Ludwig Hupfeld and others. Like many such rolls, it is important that they should remain available in some public way, especially as their current owners are failing to grow any younger! The pressure of age and available time is the main reason why these Scriabin videos are based around a single image, but we hope that the photograph of Aleksandr Nikolaevich playing to an intimate group of musicians and engineers will complement the composer's performance style, even though the recording session depicted is for the Welte-Mignon, and located in Moscow in 1910, rather than Leipzig in 1908.

Rex Lawson