Sorabji's Concerto for Piano Solo
Alscribji | Washington, D.C. | 04/20/2007
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Five stars are not enough to rate this CD. Ten stars is more adequate. Jonathan Powell, whom I had the fortune of seeing perform Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum in Manhattan in June of 2004, delivers a stellar performance of a spectacular tour de force of Sorabjian pianistic writing. Sorabji was influenced by Alkan's Concerto for piano solo when he completed composing the piece heard here, Concerto per suonare de me solo, in 1946. In this piece, Sorabji pulls out all of his usual musical vocabulary: dense chromatic filigree, ornate musical structures, the 'nocturne' genre (2nd movement of the Concerto) that Sorabji is often identified with (e.g., Djami, Gulistan, and le jardin de parfume), and left-handed ebbing motifs with right-handed acrobats, yet tastefully musical in the Sorabjian way. Next to Charles Hopkins's recording of Gulistan, Jonathan Powell's recording heard here is the most appealing of all of the Sorabji CDs presently available. Highly highly recommended. This CD reveals all that Sorabji was harmonically and pianistically about. Powell is one of the few pianists (VERY FEW) who can deliver this music convincingly and persuasively. His technique reveals Sorabji's music as it should be; Powell is more than up to the task of meeting the demands of Sorabji's music, its excesses as well as its sheer musicality. This is one of the BEST. Get it."
Music for the masses . . .
Valerie Scruggs | Alexandria, Va | 04/19/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This is an incredible roller coaster ride that contains all the jaw dropping virtuousity and pyrotechnical display that one expects from both composer and performer. What one doesn't expect - or at leat I didn't - was to find each movement more perfect, more beautifully crafted, more lyrical than the one that preceded it.
If you were ever waiting for the ideal introduction to the music of Sorabji, then, wait no more. This is an astounding, once-in-a-lifetime experience that you shouldn't be without. Wait no more.
This disc, by all rights, should have ten stars; five just doesn't do it justice."
Like a trial-sized Opus Clavicembalisticum
Michael Schell | www.schellsburg.com | 07/05/2010
(4 out of 5 stars)
"In his old age, Sorabji begrudgingly resumed allowing musicians to program his works. Before then, and before the age of online audio samples, we old-timers curious about his music had to track down the occasional analysis article in a British music journal to get an idea what it sounded like. Most of what we knew about him was came from brief biographical entries that depicted a recalcitrant and eccentric man who wrote piano works of such length and complexity as to reduce their audience to a small group of extremely patient musical people. Then there was that notorious Guinness World Records entry...
Now that his music is becoming easily available, we can see that that although Sorabji danced to his own tune, it's possible to place him in a stylistic and historical context, reaching back to the Chopin, Liszt and Alkan in the 19th Century to the likes of Scriabin, Debussy and modernism in general in the 20th Century. Throw in some more offbeat influences like Busoni and Godowsky, and you wind up with something like Schoenberg crossed with Cecil Taylor.
If you're looking for an introduction to Sorabji, you could do worse than this piece and this performance. The Concerto clocks in at a brief (for Sorabji) hour, includes some clearly delineated sections, a few rather unusual passages of pastiche (like the sardonic dance heard about seven minutes into the scherzo diabolico), and is much less distended than many of the composer's more famous works. The title means "Concerto to play by myself", and it features the stylistic traits that we associate with Sorabji's piano music, such as the loud rapid atonal runs, the Berg-like phrases meandering seemingly haphazardly from motive to motive and the busy writing for the right hand.
I'm not familiar enough with the music to assess Powell's accuracy, but he seems to have the respect of the community of Sorabji devotees, and he seems able to emphasize the structural hierarchy better than many Sorabji interpreters. There's more subtlety going on here than the succession of loud, fast playing that one sometimes gets when Sorabji's piano music is performed."
