Mission impossible?

Just before Peter Donohoe played the last of Alexander Scriabin’s ten piano sonatas at the Guildhall’s Milton Court on Sunday, the autograph score of the piece was beamed on to the wall behind him. It was just a glimpse —- but enough to show us that Scriabin had the most beautiful musical calligraphy of any composer since Bach.

On the face of it, that’s surprising. You would expect the Cantor of St Thomas’s to inscribe neatly — and indeed baroque musicians often play Bach straight from his own manuscripts, preening as they do so. But Scriabin is often regarded as a messy composer, in thrall to the mystical fads of pre-revolutionary Russia. So you might envisage a scrawl covered in ink blots and frenzied crossings-out.

It’s true that Scriabin’s mysticism hasn’t aged well; nor have his laborious attempts to link every tone in the chromatic scale to a specific colour and emotion.