Alexander Scriabin, whose 150th anniversary we celebrated in 2022, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, one year his junior, were rivals at the Moscow Conservatory as students in both piano and composition. At the piano final exam in 1891, Rachmaninoff was awarded first prize and Scriabin second – it’s fascinating just to imagine what this rivalry between music history’s most famous classmates had been like. Subsequently, they went their separate ways; in particular, Scriabin became drawn to Nietzsche’s Übermensch theory and Blavatsky’s theosophy and his musical style changed drastically, leading to his so-called music of mysticism with the heavy use of progressive harmonies.

For many years now, I have been playing piano transcriptions in my recitals, and the programme on this disc was originally devised for my concert at the Valletta Baroque Music Festival in Malta in January 2020. I have special affinity with many of the pieces, but here I will share just a couple. One is my own transcription of the aria “Erbarme Dich, mein Gott”, which I first performed at a Preface concert entitled “Homage to Toru Takemitsu”. As I explained on that occasion, Takemitsu loved this aria; he would play it every time he set to work on a new composition, and also by chance he heard this piece on the radio the day before he died. The other piece that is close to my heart is the Passacaglia and Fugue in Eugen d’Albert’s transcription, which I played when I collaborated with Mathieu Ganio, danseur étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet. Until then, Mathieu was mostly cast as a prince, but in this project, he took on a new challenge to perform a one-man play. I still remember vividly how he appeared on stage with this music, naked down to the waist, like the image of Christ on the way towards his crucifixion.

Kotaro Fukuma began piano lessons at the age of five and received numerous awards at prestigious international competitions. At the age of twenty he won the First Prize and the Chopin Prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition. His debut production on ARS PRODUKTION is dedicated to this composer.