Scriabin: Le Poème du feu
Read the programme notes for the concert Scriabin: Le Poème du feu. ----- A heady fusion of sound, mysticism, and colour: a swirling, ritualistic vision of music as pure experience.
'I am a moment illuminating eternity, I am affirmation, I am ecstasy.'
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Scriabin wasn’t just a composer—he saw himself as a prophet of a new world, with music as the key to transformation. For him, the senses were everything: only through intense, conscious experience could humanity reach true ecstasy. With each symphony, he pushed the boundaries further. His Fifth, The Poem of Fire, became a heady fusion of sound, mysticism, and colour: a swirling, ritualistic vision of music as pure experience.
Le Poème du feu work calls for a large orchestra, women’s choir, piano, and—well ahead of its time—a colour organ to project light in sync with the music. Scriabin never saw that dream fully realised, but he left the door wide open for others to imagine what it could be. Now, at the invitation of the Brussels Philharmonic, Nazanin Fakoor brings that vision to life—not only for The Poem of Fire, but also for Debussy’s shimmering La Mer.
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Nazanin Fakoor is an Iranian-German multi-disciplinary artist and director based in Brussels. Her visual installations and performances are worlds that the spectator can enter and influence. Through her work, she explores utopian possibilities at the intersection of recognition and alienation, aesthetics and social issues, and reality and possibility, blending video, performance, and installation with light, sound, movement and music.
Scriabin: Le Poème du feu · 06.12.2025 · Flagey
Alexander Scriabin wasn’t just a composer—he saw himself as a prophet of a new world, with music as the key to transformation. For him, the senses were everything: only through intense, conscious experience could humanity reach true ecstasy. With each symphony, he pushed the boundaries further. His Fifth — The Poem of Fire — became a heady fusion of sound, mysticism, and colour: a swirling, ritualistic vision of music as pure experience.
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Nazanin Fakoor's installation 'Rainbow' in a symphonic performance
For the concert Le Poème du feu, Nazanin Fakoor transforms her installation Rainbow into a light sculpture that floats above the orchestra. Slowly rotating mirror panels catch the light and cast it into the concert hall. Projected images break apart on the mirrors and drift through the space like scattered fragments. Together they form a kaleidoscope of light, colour, and movement, in dialogue with the music of Scriabin and Debussy.
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'Light is the central material of my work, which is a continuous exploration of reflection and refraction, and an attempt to give form to something that, by its nature, cannot be grasped. A flame, a glow of colour, a rainbow: they exist only through the interplay of light, space, and perception. We cannot hold them; we can only witness their transformations.
For Debussy’s La Mer, a shifting world of water emerges: a space of liquidity and reflection, created with white light. This white light also foreshadows the ascent into incandescent colours during Scriabin's music. For me, Le Poème du Feu is a meditation on transformation. Sound ignites colour, and colour refracts into countless possibilities. Just as fire in Scriabin’s score evolves from a spark into a radiant flame, the visual installation traces a continuous process of ignition and expansion. Through layered projections, reflections, and prismatic forms, the visual world grows, dissolves, and reshapes itself.
Drawing on Scriabin's dream of a synaesthetic universe, the audience is invited into an immersive space of pulsing light. Scriabin’s 'color organ' here becomes a contemporary multimedia experience.'
Beyond The Score
With Beyond The Score, Brussels Philharmonic looks beyond the notes, exploring what symphonic music awakens in other voices in our society. Music touches us all, and always tells a story. But what's that same story through the eyes of a poet? Or through the work of a Brussels-based artist? How do they write new layers over the music of Ravel, Scriabin, or Stravinsky – and does that change not only our perspective, but also yours?
Beyond The Score is creation, encounter, and cross-pollination with the wider arts field. More voices. More impulses. And above all: music. More than music.
Beyond the Score: season 25-26
longread: examining Scriabin
Nuno Cernadas, pianist and PhD researcher at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussels examines Scriabin's oeuvre.
