Alexander Scriabin's Tenth Sonata, occasionally but inaccurately described as being in C major, when compared to the bleak spiritual decay and anguished harmonies of the Ninth Sonata (the so-called "Black Mass" whose complete desolation shocked even the composer), is an essay of brilliant, radiant light. Scriabin himself described it as a "Sonata of insects...born from the sun; they are the sun's kisses." For many years the composer had been moving further and further away from the Chopin/Liszt heritage into which he had, due to his mother's own pianistic training, been born (to be fair, Scriabin's music had always been filled with an ecstatic rapture entirely his own). With the Fourth and Fifth Sonatas he approached the gates of atonality and total thematic fragmentation, and by the time of the final five sonatas, all composed over a span of two years from 1911 to 1913, the journey was complete. The Tenth Sonata is not among the composer's most frequently played works, lacking either the immediate, lush appeal of his earlier compositions or the pseudo-programmatic appeal of his later ones (which are often either given poetic titles, like the "Black Mass," or are themselves musical poems, as in the case of the last orchestral works), and yet it is one of the composer's best. After a gentle, initially unaccompanied, set of melodic gestures (immediately repeated against a sonorous bass and then developed for a while) that feature the important interval of the falling third, Scriabin opens the cage in which the insects are confined: soon the music is buzzing with trills from all around -- it is to this feature that the work owes its popular subtitle "Trill." Although, like all of Scriabin's later sonatas, the work is cast in a single highly individual movement, we can still see the vague shadows of traditional sonata-allegro design (or perhaps the shadows of the basic, very logical principles around which that form originally developed). Three larger sections fill roles that are essentially those of presentation, departure, and return (or exposition, development, and recapitulation). During the middle portion, the feverish buzzing rises to a climax that thrusts both hands' trills into the upper register of the instrument. The very first, single-line gesture of the piece is not given again until after the richly-varied "recapitulation" has been made; it arrives quite unexpectedly, and is punctuated by a falling fourth in the bass that ends on C natural -- a pitch that, in his last music, assumes great significance for Scriabin, who came to view it as a kind of cleansing tonal focus. ~ Blair Johnston, All Music Guide
