The Evolution of Artistic Interpretation via Crossdisciplinary Contexts: Late Scriabin
This presentation explores how multi-sensory, crossdisciplinary collaboration can illuminate the expressive potential of Alexander Scriabin’s piano œuvre — from his evocative character miniatures to his monumental late Sonatas. Drawing on two recent practice-led productions, “Vers le Mystère” (2022) and “The Scriabin Sonatas Reimagined, Part 2” (2023–2024), I demonstrate how integrating dance, light design, installations, and scent reveals latent layers of musical meaning, resulting in enriched performance, nuanced interpretational decisions, and deeper artistic insight.
Project “Vers le Mystère” focuses on Scriabin’s shorter character pieces, each titled to convey a distinct mood or narrative. Collaborating with a dancer, I examined how movement improvisation can reshape pianistic interpretation — particularly in rubato, spatial awareness, and structural understanding, among other aspects. Building on that work, “The Scriabin Sonatas Reimagined, Part 2” expands these concepts into a larger-scale performance, weaving light design, spatial installations, and custom-created tailored scents into Scriabin’s Five Late Sonatas. The result is a deepened pianistic interpretation, with flexible nuanced phrasing, balance, articulation, pedaling, and temporal phenomena, as well as an immersive experience that transcends the traditional recital format, allowing performers and audiences alike to cross over the discipline boundaries by engaging multiple senses simultaneously.
Using short video excerpts, live demonstrations, and reflections on methodological practices, this presentation outlines the collaborative processes and highlights practical takeaways for artists and researchers seeking to integrate artistic practice with scholarly investigation. By connecting concepts of embodiment, interpersonal gestural communication, crossmodal perception, autoethnography, stimulated recall, and elements of interpretative phenomenological analysis with the tangible demands of concert performance, I aim to show how artistic research can enhance a dialogue between academic and creative ways of knowing, ultimately enriching both fields. By weaving reflective observations with live or recorded examples of artistic practice, this presentation aims to promote an exchange on how cross-sensorial collaboration can help us see, hear, and sense beyond conventional classical performance traditions
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Elina Akselrud
Piano
Elina Akselrud is the founder and artistic director of Intertwining Arts, a crossdisciplinary team that investigates how dance, light, olfaction, and stage design can transform classical music performance. From 2014 the main focus of her work has been expanding the concept of a piano solo recital by collaborating with artists from other genres and simultaneously blending music with theater, photography/video projection, live painting projection, dance, lighting art, 3D projection, and spatial as well as olfactory installations on stage. Elina and her Intertwining Arts Team created and premiered “Chopin: A Letter through the Parisian Years” (2016-2018), “The Scriabin Sonatas Reimagined, Part 1” (2018-2019), “Transience: Painting after Scriabin and Vine” (2019-2020), “Messiaen. A Birdsoul” (2020-2021), “Vers le Mystère” (2022-2023), and “The Scriabin Sonatas Reimagined, Part 2” (2023-2024) with performances in France, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, and Austria including cinematic version releases of these works. The pianist also actively performs and records themed chamber music projects, including premieres of commissioned pieces.
Starting from 2018 Elina has been focusing on the legacy of Alexander Scriabin: in addition to presenting and releasing her crossdisciplinary projects throughout Europe and online, she recorded a survey of Scriabin's music, encompassing nearly all his late works for solo piano.
Elina Akselrud’s doctoral project “Artistic Interpretation in a Crossdisciplinary Context – The Late Piano Œuvre of Alexander Scriabin” has been supervised by O.Univ.Prof. Markus Schirmer and Univ.Prof. Mag.art Dr.Phil. Deniz Peters, while Prof. Håkon Austbø and Prof. MPhil. Anna Gawboy, PhD are the external advisors. Starting from 2022 she has been holding a research assistant position at the Center for Artistic Research at University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. In addition to her doctoral work Elina performed at Scriabin Sonatas Marathons at the LacMus (Como) and Busoni (Bolzano) Festivals in Italy in 2022, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the composer. In 2024, she was a production assistant to her external doctoral advisor, Dr. Anna Gawboy in Boston, MA, USA, in a lighted performance of Scriabin’s Prometheus, Op. 60, with Boston Symphony Orchestra, while researching interdisciplinary artistic processes. Elina’s recent exposition on Scriabin's miniatures “The TIME, SPACE, and GESTURE in a Crossdisciplinary Context” appeared in the Finnish journal RUUKKU — Studies in Artistic Research, 21 (2024). She presented her research on interpretation of Scriabin's works at forums and conferences, such as ARTikulationen (Graz, Austria, 2022, Best Practice Award), Orpheus Doctoral Conference (Ghent, Belgium, 2022), the VIII Art of Research Conference (Espoo, Finland, 2023), and PARL Next Generation Symposium (Linz, Austria, 2025). In 2025 she digitally released her signature album Alexander Scriabin: Complete Piano Sonatas on Prospero Classical Records.