June 22, 2004

MUSIC REVIEW; Rare and Monumental

Work Finds Its Robust Challenger
By ALLAN KOZINN

The strangeness of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's place in the history

of the keyboard is of his own making. An eccentric English pianist
and composer, he devoted his concerts to his own works, which
tended to be vast, technically demanding structures that required huge
reserves of energy.
In the 1930's he abruptly abandoned the concert hall and discouraged
performances of his works in the belief that neither pianists nor
audiences were equal to them. He continued to compose prolifically
until his death in 1988, but it wasn't until the late 1970's -- after a
handful of young pianists convinced him that they could do his music
justice -- that he authorized performances.
Still, Sorabji's music has not been frequently heard, and when a
pianist programs some of it, it is a certified big deal. It is an even
bigger deal when two pianists present major Sorabji works back to
back. Just two days after Donna Amato played Sorabji's Fifth Piano
Symphony (1972-3) at Merkin Concert Hall, Jonathan Powell, an
English pianist who has made a specialty of Sorabji, performed his
''Opus Clavicembalisticum'' (1930), a four-and-a-half-hour tsunami of
piano texture, also at Merkin.
At the time Sorabji composed ''Opus Clavicembalisticum,'' he was
fascinated with the music of Busoni, and his freely atonal but not
especially dissonant language has much in common with Busoni's and
Scriabin's. Like Busoni, Sorabji was interested in fugues, and ''Opus
Clavicembalisticum'' includes three enormous and increasingly
complex ones, as well as a coda in which all the fugue themes are
interwoven. Grander still are two ''Interludium'' movements,
mammoth variation sets: 69 variations in the first and 81 in the
second, which alone lasts about an hour.
There is some spectacular writing here. The two comparatively short
''Cadenza'' movements are rich in filigreed texturing that sets them
apart from the work's larger structural pillars. The fugues and
variations are both muscular and involved and draw on a lively and
assertive imagination.

If there is one flaw in the work, though, it is in its rhythmic

squareness. Sorabji avoided meter in this piece: the score carries no
time signature, and the music is presented as a freely flowing stream
of notation, with bar lines indicating structure rather than a prescribed
number of beats. Yet for all that freedom, Sorabji settled into
repeating rhythms -- and not only in the fugues, where that is
unavoidable -- that yield a gray sameness after a while.
Mr. Powell played the work with one short intermission (Sorabji
allowed for two), and his performance was powerful and robust, equal
to the work in every way. Perhaps most striking was the clarity with
which he presented Sorabji's fugues, even as the strands of the music
coalesced into a huge welter of sound. The performance was
viscerally and intellectually pleasing in roughly equal measure, a
combination of qualities Sorabji would probably have admired.

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