This is apropos of absolutely nothing at all, but I wanted to put in that as a result of this thread I purchased awhile ago Jonathan Powell's recording of Gulistan and Rosario d'arabeschi, having previously known Sorabji only by reputation and a glance at a few scores. 

I am really, really taken with these pieces - Rosario in particular; the idea of the constant availability not just of the whole of the keyboard but the whole of, I imagine, the entire pre-existing history of pianistic gesture (for, unless I'm mistaken, not having seen the scores, Sorabji was not a significant innovator in that particular respect, in these pieces at least) at any moment is quite striking - although I know Ian will turn red at the comparison I find something quite Finnissian about that.

Where to turn next for a particular fan of Rosario?  I have no musical objection to, say, OC, but I do have a budgetary one at the moment 

There is indeed more to Finnissy than that. But there is also more to Sorabji. I think the experts will agree with me that these two pieces show Sorabji in a less texturally innovative mode than, say, in parts of OC and the Fourth Sonata and numbers of other pieces I've come across which aren't yet available on commercial recordings. I think it's also true to say that JP tends in his performances to emphasise their continuity with pianistic tradition, while other pianists (eg. Habermann and Ogdon) place more stress on the opposite tendency, and the relative lack of performing indications in the scores (especially as concerns balance between different "voices") seems to leave this matter relatively open to interpretation.

Only in so far as the longer pieces tend to be more "serious" in intent than the shorter ones - while Rosario ends with something which obviously comes under the heading "tarantella", such a formal, textural or referential strategy would be completely out of place in the long works I mentioned - although they contain things like fugues, variations and passacaglias, these are often a quite individual confrontation between strict form and innovative texture. The variation movement of OC, for example (nearly an hour in itself), moves through some regions of piano texture which were quite unfamiliar to me.

Just to add to this that an emphasis upon mediation and individuation is itself equally part of pianistic tradition. Tradition only becomes 'Tradition', in the sense of an object, after the event; during its own time it constitutes a process.


Is that particularly 'proto-modernist', though? In one sense or another, composers have drawn upon a wide range of earlier models for centuries (take the Goldberg Variations, for example, which shifts between Italian, German and French styles (and the use of folk-song) quite effortlessly, whilst always being utterly itself).

Sure, but that can be found (albeit to a lesser degree) in Mozart as well, where a relatively short section can incorporate and integrate aspects of German, Italian and Turkish archetypes (in his more mature works)? Or in Chopin when (as in the Third Sonata, which I've been looking again at, mean to post something further on in response to roslynmuse's fascinating observations) there can be both integration and interplay of French, Italian and Polish idioms?

If anyone would like to hear the first section (i.e. movements 1-5) of Opus clavicembalisticum with more right notes than in some of the commercially available recordings, you can download them from links at the bottom of this page: http://jonathanpowell.wordpress.com/recordings/.

Ditto the thanks.