Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892–1988)
Toccata Terza (1955)
Abel Sánchez-Aguilera (piano)
rec. 2022, Estudio Uno, Colmenar Viejo, Madrid, Spain
Reviewed as a lossless WAV download
Piano Classics PCL10304 [125]
It is something of a surprise that pianist Igor Levit hasn’t yet got round to the music of Sorabji given his fondness for resuscitating the gargantuan and the unfashionable. Sorabji’s music certainly ticks both of those boxes and combines them with high seriousness of purpose and a fondness for the technically highly complex. He belongs to a group of post war composers mainly based in Britain who might be termed ‘stubborn traditionalists’. I am thinking of figures as disparate as Ronald Stevenson and Robert Simpson (though I suspect the latter would have objected to inclusion in such a group thereby revealing himself a true Stubborn Traditionalist). I also suspect all of these composers, Sorabji included, would have bridled at the term Traditionalist. Yet all of them, in very different ways, rejected the post war dissolution of the tonal and stylistic tradition of classical music in favour of modernism and serialism. Traditional in every case does not mean a retreat into musical nostalgia.
Sorabji’s own music is thorny and difficult, progressive rather than reactionary, seeking to find ways forward within the tradition rather than destroying it. In doing this it stubbornly rejects fashion and, in most cases, any kind of exposure or popularity, sometimes wearing this as a badge of honour.
If there is a patron saint of Stubborn Traditionalism, it is Busoni, that cussed, maddening, intoxicating polymath of music who to this day resists any attempt at pigeonholing. His contrary spirit, writing concertos that aren’t really concertos and operas that aren’t really operas and Bach that isn’t Bach, presides over the strange mystical world of Sorabji’s music.
Sorabji almost seems to go out of his way to deter both performer and listener rather like the warning signs around his home in Corfe Castle that were designed to put off visitors. Many composers have despaired at ever finding interpreters up to the challenges of their music but few have effectively imposed an unofficial ban on its performance. Sorabji belongs with the likes of Alkan in the annals of musical eccentrics.
Just as Alkan is being revealed as much more than an amusing footnote in musical histories like a kind of Erik Satie but without the humour, pianists are starting to ignore Sorabji’s attempts to put them off. There has always been a coterie of performers and enthusiasts that have kept the flame of Sorabji’s music fed but the 2020s has seen a tentative flowering of releases of his music.
Sorabji himself was the very definition of an outsider with an English mother and a Parsi father and as a homosexual at a time when it was illegal and a self taught composer. There is more than a hint of the autistic about his behaviour to boot. Some idea of how far he resided from the mainstream of his contemporary musical establishment might be gleaned from the fact that his principal early champion was the outsider’s outsider, Peter Warlock. A trust fund from his father removed the necessity of making money and can only have contributed to Sorabji’s disengagement from the usual promotional activities required of composers. All these elements combined to create a hothouse for breeding a highly distinctive musical personality.
A flavour of that distinctiveness can gleaned from the fact that the mammoth score given its world premiere recording on this latest release contains, amongst its ten movements, a passacaglia with no fewer than 102 variations (!) and lasts 48 minutes. This is most decidedly a composer indifferent to the human needs of either pianist or audience. It is, of course, music ideally suited to listening on record. It was with some relief that I first experienced Piano Classics’ warm, ingratiating piano sound on this new recording. Like his admired friend Ronald Stevenson, Sorabji liked big dense polyphonic piano textures and stretched over two hours of poor piano sound would get wearing. Thankfully the sound on this release is first class.
In terms of his writing for piano, Sorabji is seldom interested in the virtuosic for its own sake – he was much too high minded for that – but he does delight, in his characteristically understated way, in a huge variety of piano textures. Debussy and the more perfumed pages of Szymanowski seem as much an influence as Busoni in this regard. As Sanchez-Aguilera points out in his thorough, self penned notes, there is a whiff of a Lisztian Mephistopheles about Sorabji’s mysticism.
It is a bit of a pity that Sanchez-Aguilera’s excellent notes confine themselves to the technical aspects of the music and give no hint of the spiritual and philosophical ideas that underpin it. Whilst the composer embraced and then departed from his Parsi faith, in other ways his pick and mix approach to spirituality is typical of sensitive artists growing up in the era of Madame Blavatsky and Yeats. He earns great credit for seeing through Aleister Crowley’s chicanery, labelling him ‘dull’ – a judgement with which it is hard to argue! I say this because it is clear that Sorabji’s mysticism went beyond mere fashion, unsurprising in someone with an almost pathological horror of posing.
The form of this Toccata is of a monstrously enlarged baroque suite. The piece is dominated by two enormous and enormously complex polyphonic movements of the utmost intellectual severity- the passacaglia already mentioned and the fifth movement which belies its title of quasi fugaro by presenting us with a most thoroughly worked out fugue of nearly twelve minutes duration. After that, relatively speaking, Sorabji lets his hair down with a series of baroque influenced character pieces such as a Fantasia and a Capriccio. Needless to say that whilst the manner of these pieces is more playful, they are all concerned with exploring and developing the material of the earlier movements. It is almost as if the technical discipline of the big contrapuntal movements was necessary to open up Sorabji’s imagination for these later flights of fancy.
As for the performance, Sanchez-Aguiilera is a most agreeable guide. There were moments when I wished he had thrown caution to the winds since this is music very obviously indebted to the virtuoso tradition of the nineteenth century. I suspect the realities of performing a piano piece of two hours duration means that pacing is more important than incidental thrills and the fact that Sanchez-Aguilera held my delighted attention to the very last note demonstrates that he knows better than I.
Perhaps the bigger point is that there is little point in trying to sex this music up. In its very marrow it challenges the listener in the most uncompromising manner. It actively rejects casual listening. There is no pointing ‘selling’ it to the listener as that would be to indulge in false promises. There will be a question of course as to whether it is worth the effort. When we listen to Beethoven’s Op131 we know already that for all its difficulties a transcendent experience awaits us. Very few listeners know if anything even vaguely comparable awaits us when we step through the imposing portals of Sorabji’s Toccata Terza.
I have attempted to give some indication as to the flavours of this music but in music as unique as this such comparisons must fall short. Each listener is going to have to make their own mind up. I suspect many will loathe it but then, for reasons that seem unfathomable to me, some people loathe Bruckner. As for myself, I found this a piece that drew me in further and further into its strange unworldly places the longer I listened. It is a testament to Sorabji’s inspiration that rather than growing bored at its extreme length my enthusiasm grew and what initially seemed like hard work became a delight. By the time I reached the trickling stream of the sixth movement’s Corrente I was a convert.
David McDade
Previous review: Paul RW Jackson (June 2024)
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