Irina Vanechkina and Bulat Galeev
Over its first 35 years, the collective returned repeatedly to Alexander Scriabin’s “Prometheus”. At first it followed the composer’s lighting score closely; later it expanded the Luce part with complex moving forms.
The team took a more radical approach for the Kazan Conservatory’s 50th-anniversary concert on 21 June 1996. The programme included “Prometheus”, conducted by Fuat Mansurov with pianist Evgeny Mikhailov. The new hall had two powerful “PANI VR-4 Compact” slide projectors, a 9 × 9 metre screen and a dissolve system. This enabled the team to realise a long-standing idea: using paintings by Wassily Kandinsky as the visual interpretation of Scriabin’s Luce.
Alexander Scriabin and Wassily Kandinsky were contemporaries and innovators in their respective fields. Both were drawn to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and imagined new forms that could unite several arts. Scriabin approached this through his proposed “Mystery”; Kandinsky through his vision of a “Great Utopia”. Theosophy and artistic cosmism also shaped both artists’ ideas about synthesis.
Kandinsky’s work moved broadly from early abstract expressionism to geometric abstraction and, later, biomorphic forms. While selecting paintings for “Prometheus”, the team found that this development could follow the music in roughly chronological order. The evolution of Kandinsky’s visual language echoed the thematic development of Scriabin’s score.
“Prometheus” is a single-movement symphonic poem based on sonata form, with an introduction and coda. Its philosophical programme unfolds through themes associated with the creative spirit, will, reason, play, language and pleasure. The team matched each musical theme with a group of Kandinsky paintings, drawing on their titles and on the artist’s writings about the symbolism of colour and form, particularly “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”.
The visual score opened with Kandinsky’s “Improvisation” (1914), reflecting Scriabin’s description of “violet chaos”. “Composition VII” accompanied the Prometheus theme, while the sharper geometry of works such as “Sharp Angles”, “Diagonal”, “Black Forms” and “In Blue” answered the theme of will. “Several Circles” corresponded to reason. Other sections used “Red Oval”, “Blue Circle”, “Moscow I” and late biomorphic paintings including “Composition X” and “Around the Circle”. In the finale, the images dissolved into an increasingly bright field of light.
The team expected this interpretation to challenge ideas about the “purity” of the genre. Its aim was not to illustrate the music, but to create a director’s synthesis of two independent works. Grigory Gidoni had imagined comparable pairings, writing that “Prometheus” might be performed through Scriabin and El Greco, Vrubel or Gidoni. The Kazan production proposed another encounter: Alexander Scriabin and Wassily Kandinsky.
List of links:
Vanechkina I., Galeev B. Poem of Fire. – Kazan: KSU Publishing House, 1981.
Gidoni G.I. The art of light and colour. – Leningrad, 1933, p. 22.
Publ. With abbreviations in the journal “Leonardo” v.31, 1988, N 3, pp.183-184.
