Sorabji’s Vocal and Chamber Works

SORABJI: Désir épardu for piano.⁸ Il tessuto d’arabeschi for flute & string quartet.^1,10 Le mauvais jardinier for voice & piano.^2,8 Frammento cantato for baritone & piano.^6,8 Fantasiettina atematica for oboe, flute & clarinet.³ Trois poèmes for soprano & piano.^4,8 Cinque sonetti di Michelangelo Buonarroti for baritone & chamber orch.^5.6,10 Arabesque for soprano & piano.^4,8 Benedizione di San Francesco d’Assisifor baritone and organ.⁶ Trois poèmes di Gulistān de Sa’dī for voice & piano.^7,9 [4] Frammenti aforistici for piano.⁸ Frammento cantato for baritone & organ.⁶ Movement for voice & piano^2.9 / Chappell Kingsland, ⁸pno/org /¹cond; ¹Sharon Bezaly, ³Julie Thornton, fl; ¹⁰Wild Beautiful Ens; ²Sharon Harms, ⁴Zoë Spangler, sop; ⁶Andrew Garland, ⁷Christopher Grundy, bar; Sarah Bierhaus, ob; Jeremy Reynolds, cl;  ⁵Taylor Gonzales, cond; ⁹Bryan Chuan, pno / Bis SACD-2683

One of my Facebook followers complained to me that all of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s music is for the piano, which is like saying that all of Chopin’s and most of Scriabin’s music is for that instrument. The issue is not what instrument or instruments it is written for but whether or not the music is great, bad, or mediocre, and I also pointed out to him that Sorabji wrote very long symphonies, of which I only have one recording and that is an unofficial YouTube release created by a synthesizer mixed with some real-life instrumentalists. Sorabji’s music is just so long, complex and confusing to most listeners that it is never played much in concert.

On this disc, however, we have 13 of his compositions, only two of which are for solo piano, six are songs or song cycles for voice and piano, and two of which are purely instrumental. More interestingly, none of them are very long; only four of them are 13 minutes or longer, the rest clocking in at between a minute and a half to six and a half minutes except for the opening Désir épardu for piano which is, shockingly, only 50 seconds long. Thus this may be the recording that my follower would want to start with to orient himself with Sorabji creating music on a smaller scale. Many of these, according to the booklet, are late works, so either he wrote shorter because he had reached a point in life where he could compress his ideas or he was afraid to extend himself because he felt his time was shortening, thus he didn’t want to get bogged down in trying to extent his musical forms to epic lengths.

Indeed, the second piece on this album, Il tessuro arabeschi (1979) for flute and string quartet, is so densely written and in such a strongly bitonal style that it could easily pass for something composed in the past 10 years or so. Listening as carefully as I could, however, I got the impression that the dissonance one hears from the accompanying string quartet is in itself written in a microtonal rather than a bitonal fashion, because most of the time the strings do not sound as if they are in complete harmonic concordance with each other. Of course, the other answer could simply be that one of them was not properly tuned, but since these are highly-paid professionals who certainly had the chance to re-take the piece had it come out in a defective manner suggests tome that this sound has more to do with Sorabji’s writing than a performance flaw. Consider, for instance, that on this track the string quartet has a conductor to hold them together. But without the score, I can’t be certain, and the problem, if it is one, occurs in the upper strings. The cello is rock solid in tune from start to finish and, as usual, Sharon Bezaly’s playing is simply astonishing. She was one of former label owner Robert von Bahr’s favorite artists on Bis. For music written by an 87-year-old composer, it is simply astonishing.

Le mauvais jardinier is a much earlier piece, composed in 1918 or ’19 when Sorabji was only 26 or 27 years old. In some ways it is typical of his song writing, yet there are many parlando passages in it that clearly show the influence of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. This in itself is rather amazing, since the majority of Sorabji’s music leaned towards tonality even when it was harmonically complex (or even harmonically congested) and almost never towards the new Viennese school. The Frammento cantato for baritone and piano is much more typical of his songwriting style; written in 1967, it is lyrical in the tradition of other 20th-century British composers like Vaughan Williams. (For a guy who constantly complained about not being “really” British because his parents were Farsi, it always struck me as ironic that not only did Sorabji, whose birth name was Leon Dudley, stay in England his entire life but that his music borrowed practically nothing from Middle Eastern culture except for his piano piece Gulistān.)

The Trois poèmes for soprano and piano were written at a midway point in his career (1941), a time when he was much more famous in England for his witty yet trenchant music criticism and a few years before he banned all public performances of his music for about 30 years. This is very much quintessential song writing for Sorabji, a lyrical and largely tonal top line riding over a technically difficult, harmonically complex and musically contrasting piano part, although in this case I found the piano accompaniment even busier than usual, almost to the point where it buried the singer and interfered with her line, particularly in the first song. Happily both of our sopranos have clear, well-trained voices with no audible defects and, wonder of wonders, clear diction, although between the two of them I felt that Zoë Spangler, who sings this trio of songs, had a more interesting and distinctive timbre than Sharon Harms.

Interestingly, Sorabji’s setting of five sonnets of Michelangelo are much denser in harmony and trickier in rhythm (the orchestra always seems to be playing not only different music but different harmony and rhythms than the singer) than the more famous set by Benjamin Britten for piano and tenor written 17 years later…but since Sorabji was a lone-wolf composer whose music was rarely performed, I doubt that Britten even knew of this music’s existence. The “Wild Beautiful Orchestra” and its offshoot, the Wild Beautiful Ensemble, are aptly named in terms of their wildness but not necessarily in terms of beauty of sound. Here, I felt that their very individual timbres made their playing in the different orchestral sections sound discrete from the other sections. But again, I don’t have a score and can’t tell if this was Sorabji’s intent. With his music, the naked ear can’t always tell what exactly is going on, particularly when he wrote for an instrumental ensemble. His ears were just tuned differently from other composers’. One interesting feature of this song cycle is that the sonnets are linked musically with no break between them.

The Arabesque for soprano and piano is much more typical of the usual Sorabji song, an exotic piano accompaniment to a lyrical if somewhat bitonal sung line—except that it’s very short. The Benediction of St. Francis of Assisi returns us to a fairly turgid accompaniment, in this case by an organ, but it, too is quite short. We hear our alternate baritone, Christopher Grundy, in the Gulistān poems; his voice, unfortunately, is not a good one, being too far back in the throat and unsteady in tonal emission which makes him sound a twinge flat most of the time, but the music is again interesting. Encasing his dry, forced, out of tune voice in a sea of reverb does not help matters. We then hear two fragments, one for piano and the other for baritone and organ. Although I generally like Bis’ SACD sonics, on this recording all of the organ pieces sound too muddy and indistinct for me. I don’t necessarily want to hear an organ that sounds as if I’m standing in the middle of the big pipes.

We end this survey of Sorabji’s music with a wordless “movement” for soprano and piano, another piece quite typical of his writing for such a combination, very well sung by Harms. Except for Grundy’s singing, this is an excellent disc from start to finish, a real ear-opener even for such a veteran Sorabji listener as myself. An excellent addition to the growing catalog of his music on records.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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