Three Sonatas for Piano (Op. 66, 68, 70)

Alexander Scriabin's piano sonatas are a testimony to the spasmodic tension the composer brought to that act of consciousness and regeneration to which he gave the name ecstasy. Scriabin would almost never forsake that most classical of forms, the sonata (only the Ninth has a less recognizable structure). In the Eighth and the Tenth, after an introductory section, the themes stand out clearly in the exposition and then, just as clearly, they are elaborated (compared, superimposed, transformed) in the development and taken up again in the re-exposition, reaching a coda in which the music accelerates vertiginously, as in a vortex, only to eventually turn back in on itself circularly (the Tenth).