Kaikhosru Sorabji
Piano Music And Transcriptions
Michael Habermann made the first, and in many respects the best commercial recordings devoted to Kaikhosru Sorabji’s ridiculously difficult and overwrought piano works. As with Habermann’s previous three Sorabji discs, the present recital offers several sides of the composer: variation writer, miniaturist, paraphraser, and transcriber. Sorabji’s 1945 transcription of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnol largely stays faithful to the original, save for decorative showers of bitonal arpeggios and runs that a…
100 Trascendental Studies
“Volume 2 of this much-anticipated continuation of Sorabji’s mammoth set of studies takes us almost half way in terms of number, if not in playing time (perhaps a third or thereabouts). The reason for this is encapsulated in the first entry on this new disc; with No.26 the composer appears for the first time to take a decisive step back from writing pieces with some ostensibly pedagogical intent — “studies” per se — and interjects a larger, more musically intricate piece; in this case a ravishin…
100 Transcendental Studies For Piano 1-25
Sorabji's style was deeply indebted to the music of the Middle East, some forms of which, during performance, last for hours or days at a time: his piano writing is typically elaborate from the torrential upward sweep in Mouvementé (I) via the wild and spiky V to the grotesque hammering angularity of XXV - a fantastic Medtnerian march. The dramatic and passionate writing in between …