Customer Reviews

Sorabji: Opus Clavicembalisticum

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First -- what I'm about to say in no way takes anything away from Madge's performance of this piece. Madge's performance is far, FAR better than John Ogden's; and Madge seems to have captured the real essence of this piece in a way Ogden never could have. This performance represents a tremendous accomplishment for Mr. Madge. If you're going to buy a performance of the Opus Clavicembalisticum, the Madge performance is the one you should buy.

About the music: I have a feeling I'm going to upset some die-hard Sorabji enthusiasts with my comments, but I'll call this like I see it.

To be honest: for the amount of thematic material presented, and the way Sorabji uses it, I think this piece is about ten movements too long. Opus Clavicembalisticum reminds me of compositions by pianistic "whiz kids" -- 17 and 18 year olds taking composition in their first year of college, who have the technique to play anything they want, and who don't hesitate to write the most daunting technical difficulties into their music -- but simply don't have the maturity to organize a large scale piece or to frame the musicality behind what it is they're writing! (I'm guilty of having done the same thing, too, when I attended the Indiana University School of Music 28 years ago.)

Sorabji certainly knows how to write "huge," but the material in this piece just doesn't warrant a four-hour composition. While listening to all the counterpoint, all the variations, all the extremes of register -- I found myself really aching to hear one good, cohesive slow movement! The lone "Adagio" wasn't REALLY an "Adagio."

There are 20th century composers whom I play, and whom I program regularly in my own recitals, who can write on very large scales - yet manage keep their musical thoughts organized. I think of Messiaen, Busoni, Hindemith -- even Shostakovich (if we consider the 24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87). These composers are able to take their ideas and develop them -- and most importantly, to CONTRAST their ideas as they develop them.

In the Opus Clavicembalisticum, Sorabji ends up with a dulling sameness -- which, unfortunately, lasts nearly four hours. Frankly, if I were going to play a Sorabji piece, I'd probably program a smaller-scale piece such as La Jardin Parfume.

Sorabji believed the Opus Clavicembalisticum to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, pieces of all time. It's an important piece -- if anything, just to study his techniques. For all its complexity, is not great music. It is absolutely not in the same league with Bach's "Goldberg Variations", Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations" or the "Hammerklavier" sonata, Brahms' "Handel" or "Paganini" Variations, any Ravel work, the Busoni "Fantasia Contrapuntistica" or Hindemith's "Ludus Tonalis".

If you want to hear a wonderful performance of this piece, get the Madge. If you want to hear a piece LIKE this, composed by a real master, consider purchasing Messiaen's "Nativity of the Savior."

There is certainly a striking disparity among the reviews posted - praise from, for example, an admitted associate of Madge, and slanderous, disgraceful, utterly contemptible condemnation of Ogdon ("awash in anti-psychotic medication"? "not one brain cell working"? - the person who wrote this is a pig). I can only say that, having known the piece first from Madge's recording, and having recently acquired the Ogdon, there is no comparison. Ogdon makes music - and great, astonishing music - where Madge produces endless streams of uncharacterised, undifferentiated note-spinning. The fugues, in particular, are utterly mechanical and apparently devoid of any comprehension in Madge's reading. To be sure, he certainly deserves credit for tackling the work, but one wonders why he released this recording - and why he tolerates, if he does, the blatantly offensive, disgusting claquery of his supporters.

The Sorabji Opus Clavicembalum is beyond me in terms of review. Like other monumental works it seems to exist in it's own plane, above my own petty likes and dislikes, rather like the Bach Art of the Fugue or the work of Ravi Shankar. Suffice it to say that Sorabji's nearly 4 hour work is dense, fierce in it's extremes, crowded with detail, exacting in it's counterpoint and almost crazy in it's intensity. Written in a style that takes Busoni, Szymanowski and Scriabin as a starting point, Sorabji squeezes these influences through a distorting prism to create a torrent of sound unlike any other. I can't say whether I like it or not...and I'm not sure that it matters, anymore than it matters whether I like the Rocky Mountains or not.

What I can comment on definatively is the performance. Sorabji is the Holy Grail of 20th century pianism. No other composer, before or after is as complex, dense or as demanding. (Not even Michael Finnessey who comes close.) Merely to play this piece in public is an act of enormous courage...or enormous hubris. So I respect the attempt of anyone to try.

In the current instance, BIS chose to record Madge in a live recital in Chicago, playing the OC in one program. The undertaking is heroic, but there are major problems with the results. Particularly on the first disc, Madge seems to have trouble with the material. There are many obvious flubbed notes and poorly executed passages. Though these mistakes subside as the work continues, they are present throughout the performance. As a result, many passages lack the power that they should have to make them come across in performance. Even passages that are clean tend to sound tenative...as if we can hear Madge praying not to make another mistake.

I am not sure that it is possible to play this music with complete accuracy in concert...so my complaints may not really lie with Madge. But BIS should at the least have done some post-production work on these notes. I know that this is difficult to do with live performances but it is not impossible. Perhaps BIS could have rented out the hall afterwards, without an audience and done the retakes needed to clean up the performance. (If anyone here believes that most classical studio performances are done in one take and clean...you haven't been in the studio.) Alternatively, with this music it would have been better to release a studio album. Though most listeners at a performance can forgive mistakes...and should up to a point, on a disc it is something else entirely.

All this being said, I still think that a serious music lover should know this work....particularly if you like Scriabin, or Busoni. The only other competition is John Ogden's set, which is harder to find. I have yet to hear this one, but will probably try to track it down. The work deserves to be heard in a really good performances.

Three Stars for the performance - the work it self is beyond praise or condemnation.

This product is very lucky to have recieved two stars from me. It is, in a word, terrible. I do not believe there is any one word that can truly describe the atrocity that G.D. Madge has committed! A scandal! A travesty! It is because of performances like THIS that Sorabji banned performances of his works in the first place! This performance is so terrible, it is OBSCENE!

First of all, in so many places, Madge practically improvises. In the parts where there are large jumping chords, Madge merely pounds out random notes. He does not follow the music. This is what causes many to think that this piece is really bad... they think it is nothing but relentless "banging", but let me tell you, it is not! I have studied the score for this piece for a very long time now, and that is NOT what Sorabji really wrote! I could practically point out parts on every page where Madge completely fakes the performance, often not even trying to hit the right notes.

So, let us start with the very first movement. This truly sets up what will follow. Right when the music starts to get hard, he starts to make mistake after mistake. Aside from that, his playing is not clean. Later, he just starts hitting random notes, a skill that he definitely has mastered, I must say.

The second movement is no exception. Though there are moments when his playing is bearable, for the most part, it is no better than the first movement. The majority of Fuga I is faked. The Fantasia is actually all right for the most part, but he doesn't play cleanly, and at the end, he goes back to hitting random notes.

His entire Coda-Stretta is improvised. Any thing he plays that resembles the actual music even the slightest bit is merely a coincidence. And the end can make your ears bleed...

So, I gave this two stars because he played a few parts nicely, but I would not recommend this recording to anyone. I, personally, would wait for the Powell recording, since he apparently knows what he is talking about.

A towering and still-enigmatic achievement, the 'sine qua non' of all piano literature, Opus Clavicembalisticum, OC, a three-part solo piano epic, is a spell-binding work by one of history's most unusual composers. OC is not the longest piano work in existence; Sorabji himself wrote several longer, but so far, they have not been performed or recorded. At almost four hours, OC-one of those mysterious works that spurns clock time, making the mind adjust to its scale-consists of 12 movements evolving around a theme with 44 variations and a passacaglia with 81 variations. It is, as Nicholas Slonimsky says, "a brobdingnagian masterpiece." Its fugues, overstated to an impossible extent, are fantastically complex and its harmonies, in Sorabji's words, "bite like nitric acid." Of pristine counterpoint and arcane structures, OC has its own type of drama, not one built on jarring contrasts or abrupt tempo changes but one constructed with an astounding variety of tempo and textures, voluminous rhythmic combinations and ornamentation, all of which are introduced to the listener at Sorabji's unique pace. His compositional components change not over abrupt jumps in time, but through graduated gulfs. What Gertrude Stein said of writing-that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not-applies to Sorabji's music monuments. Think of a kaleidoscope slowly revolving on a pedestal, slower than human fingers can turn it. What you see an hour later bears some resemblance to the original, but with different shades and different shapes. It is easier to remember the experience of this music than to analyze it while listening, which ought to be done in a single evening, but only at all if you want to give your heart and mind--not just your brain--a real workout.

Sorabji premiered Opus Clavicembalisticum, playing it for the first and last time, in 1930, dedicating it "to the everlasting glory of those few men blessed and sanctified in the curses and execrations of those many whose praise is eternal damnation." Only two pianists have essayed it since. Before Geoffrey Douglas Madge gave OC's second performance at Utrecht in 1982, subsequently released on LPs of indifferent sound, in one of his four concerts of this legendary work, it had not been performed in its entirety in more than 50 years. Its third performance, given by John Ogdon at South Bank in 1988, was complemented by a studio-recorded CD release by Altarus over which many Sorabji 'experts' sadly shake their heads. Although on five discs rather than four to avoid splitting up the Variations, Madge takes 50 minutes less than Ogdon. As it might be expected, their approaches are opposite, and any true lover of Sorabji cannot be without both. Although idiosyncratic, Ogdon's performance is of a grandiose and wildly daring romantic voluptuousness, transcending the work's deficiencies.

Yamaha had a special piano flown in from Tokyo for this recorded performance, the US premiere, which Madge gave in Chicago in 1983. Receiving rave reviews from critics, long admired by purists as possibly the most faithful rendering this work has had, this concert has since acquired mythic status. Many people complain about all the wrong notes in Madge's performance, but I dare anybody to point them out! Madge, over the years having assembled a repertoire of formidable modern works and technical powers as a pianist, both of which may very well be without equal, is an impressively accurate player of Sorabji's mind-bogglingly involved polyphony. Complex, mammoth, and phenomenal, in OC, there are stretches of intense manic complexity and magisterial poetry that cry out for a transcendental virtuosity which Madge provides in spades, and for this I give him my highest possible praise. He had me breathless with his complete mastery of this music that is all too often too difficult for comprehension.

Sorabji, viewing technique as a physical end to spiritual means, had a venomous contempt of people that allowed him, without guilt, to thrust his heinously difficult music into a realm of well nigh unperformablility. Although of huge and daunting proportions, his works tend to have a deep personal message behind it... This astounding interpretation, performed with grace, muscularity, and above all, extraordinary patience and care, this BIS set, very well recorded, with a crystal-clean-and-clear piano and virtually no audience noise (except the excruciating applause at conclusion), is self-recommending.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892 - 1988) disdained anything so vain or plebian as currency: accepting the challenge of the greatest because most dense and extended works in the western musical tradition - from Bach's "Art of the Fugue" and "Well Tempered Clavier" and from Beethoven's monumental "Diabelli Variations" - he sought to outdo the pattern-makers in creating massive compositions of a diabolically complex motivic and contrapuntal character, requiring, in order to work out their inner logic, performance-times to be calculated in hours. To set the seal on his elite conception of musical art, Sorabji largely forbade public recitals of his work, yielding on a few occasions only, guaranteeing that no helpful performance-traditions would arise. But how could it? When pianist John Ogdon played a public concert of "Opus Clavicembalisticum" in 1975, it took five hours. Kenneth Derus, who contributes the fine notes to Geoffrey Madge's 1982 Chicago concert of the same work, now available on a BIS boxed set, argues that Ogdon played too slowly, distending the score by a full hour. Even so, no pianist can play a four-hour piece as demanding as the "Opus" more than once or twice a year - presuming that an audience could be found to sit through the traversal. For listeners, the compact disc is the ideal medium for becoming acquainted (if that were possible) with Sorabji's monumental keyboard essay, although the composer might have balked, given that he insisted on playing the monster through from beginning to end. "Opus" is in three massive parts. "Pars Prima" consists of an "Introito" followed by a "Preludio-Corale," a Fugue (I) in four voices, a "Fantasia," and a Double Fugue (II). The sequence together needs fifty minutes or so, with the two fugues needing about a quarter of an hour each. "Pars Altera" consists of an "Interludium," really a set of sixty-nine variations on a theme, a "Cadenza" (I), and a gargantuan Triple Fugue (III). The variations need forty-five minutes and the Triple Fugue thirty-four. "Pars Tertia" consists of an "Interludium" (II) further subdivided into a Toccata, an Adagio, and a Passacaglia with eighty-one variations; now comes a "Cadenza" (II), after which there is a Quadruple Fugue (IV) and "Coda-Stretto." "Pars Tertia" needs an hour and forty-five minutes for its sequence to play out. What possible attraction is there in a solo piano work lasting so long? Can a listener hope to make sense of a Quadruple Fugue of forty minutes performance-duration? The answer is "no" and "yes." One can only just barely grasp the internal logic of one of Bach's longer fugues or one of Reger's. Sorabji creates imitative structures four or five times longer than those of either of these two precursor-composers. With Sorabji, one remembers that what one might call "something fugal" is unfolding before one's ears; and then one, so to speak, "identifies with it" by mystical intuitive union. Preparation is a "sine qua non" of the endeavor, for once interrupt the audition and the thread of sympathy is broken: one must set aside the requisite chunk of time, discharge one's other obligations, and then summon the spirits of endurance and concentration for all the assistance that they can give. The validity of Sorabji's accomplishment lies in the adequately prepared auditor's absolute conviction that "this is not a hoax" but a genuine "higher experience." "Opus Clavicembalisticum" belongs to the genre of vast works in appreciation of which a certain faith is the prior stipulation: Wagner's "Parsifal," Havergal Brian's "Gothic Symphony," Nicholas Maw's "Odyssey," Morton Feldman's "String Quartet (II)," or Alexander Nemtin's completion of Alexander Scriabin's "Preparation for the Final Mystery." Like Scriabin (in his conception of the "Mystery"); like Brian or Maw - Sorabji is a "maximalist" rather than a "minimalist." The aural impression is analogously of a primal nebula spinning off stellar and planetary systems, which evolve through the main sequence and burst into novae, only to die away as clouds of red glowing gas. These then provide the raw material for further grand spasms of cosmic creation and de-creation. My appetite is now whetted to hear "Opus Clavicembalosymphonicum," a similar four-hour contrapuntal exercise for piano and orchestra, or the "Jami" Symphony. for vocal soloists, choral forces, piano, and orchestra. It will probably never happen, but the keyboard works should garner a dedicated and persistent audience. Recommended to brave souls.

It's simply stunning that some listeners extol this performance. It's even more unbelievable that they then condemn the John Ogdon recording. Ogdon's recording is a miracle of interpretation and transforms a potentially dry arrangement of academic forms into a magical and stunning experience. Do not believe the statements about his recording lacking accuracy; any approximation is based upon an understanding of the score and is only there when it increases the effect of the music.

Madge on the other hand seems to know nothing of this. Take the 1st cadenza: with John Ogdon this is fierce music, as stunning as anything you will hear. With Madge it is little more than a joke.

No thanks are due to the squashed vegetables who penned such inaccurate (and malicious) reviews on this site. The best advice is never to read reviews as they might make you sick.

With sincere respect for the dedication of anyone willing to attempt to record this gigantic opus, I have to say, regrettably...sorry, not enough technique for the job. Better wait for Hamelin to eventually come around to this one, or for the eventual re-issue of the Ogdon.

This is an excellent recording of this difficult and meandering 4 hour set of piano pieces. The Yamaha grand piano used in this CD gives some added clarity to the dense and incredibly complex passages of this (in)famous monster of piano literature.

The sheer scale of this work is gobsmacking. About 4 hours of utter complexity, much of it densely contrapuntal - you won't believe the academic audacity of the part-writing - that I suspect only a handful of pianists in the world could perform. The sound quality - it's taken live from a 1983 concert in Chicago - is excellent, and the playing is spectacular. It's probably only for piano fanatics, but if out of macabre desire you want to own a recording of the most complex piece of music ever printed then buy this CD. One proviso: I've read that John Ogdon recorded this work, but I haven't been able to locate a copy of that recording. If it's available somewhere then it would certainly be worth exploring. It's probably about the most amazing thing on disc, which explains why it's not available. Perhaps you could just buy both the Madge and the Ogdon. If pain persists, please see your doctor.