THE GUEST ARTist Recital is an apt word for friday’s performer at Roland Hayes Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Pianist Arunesh Nadgir performed Scriabin and Beethoven, the Russian Synesthesiast admired by fellow travelers, one who combined color and sound, whose musical ‘paintings’ became symbolic of Soviet intellectual high culture; and the German boy dressed foppishly in Viennese clothes, Ludwig, whose embodied romantic dissonances, asymmetry and starkly contrasting palette credited with revolutionizing art. These visionaries were made tribute to in drawing rooms across time, entertaining the literati and intelligentsia with newly inspired compositions.
The ninth piano sonata “Black Mass” was a thickly textured dissonance resolved just before the intermission. Composed late in Scriabin’s life, the symbolic piece represented little more than the name suggests, blackness. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles was composed after the Sonata 111, the last unfinished the Bonn composer ever wrote. The Six Bagatelles drew a lucid map, the romantic scope a poor prodigy managed to sketch for his brother, scaling a mountain not yet at the end of his rope. It was the last composition he wrote for the piano and the first Arunesh Nadgir performed friday at twilight.
Scriabin’s Poem is in a key found rarely in the preceding classical age, a synthesis of sound as if it was spoken aloud, the major sound tricking the ear to hear slightly off center the things normally heard. A bold move for the chromatically inclined artist, yet not so bold as Beethoven’s Sonata 57 Appassionata was to his fellows. That must have struck two hundred years ago terrifically hearing the resonant leaps on the pianoforte, the then little brother to the Steinway & Sons.
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