Kaikhosru Sorabji

Kaikhosru Sorabji was an English pianist, composer, and music journalist of the twentieth century known for his distinctively virtuosic piano music and eccentric personality. Some of the unique characteristics of his keyboard music include sophisticated counterpoint notated on up to 11 staves as found in the Organ Symphony No. 3, the use of both tonality and atonality, and extended durations like the four-hour-long Opus Clavicembalisticum. Sorabji was born in 1892, in the East London town of Chingford to an English mother and a Parsi father. He began learning the piano from his mother around 1900, followed by lessons from Emily Edroff-Smith when he was older. He attended a small private school, where in addition to a broad standard curriculum, he received instruction in harmony, piano, and organ. Sorabji continued his studies in piano and composition privately after his graduation with lessons from Charles A. Trew. Around 1913, he joined the Parsi community and changed his name from Leon Dudley Sorabji to Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. He also befriended music critic and composer Peter Warlock, who became a major influence and mentor. He began composing pieces for piano in 1914, followed by several songs, and his Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 3. With the assistance of Ferruccio Busoni, Sorabji published his Piano Sonata No. 1 in 1919, and he started performing in public in 1920. He was also active as a music critic, although he received a life income from his family’s trust fund. This also affected his attitude about composing since he wasn’t concerned about his popularity, sales, or any entrepreneurial aspects of the profession. He premiered his Opus Clavicembalisticum and Piano Sonata No. 4 around 1930, but his 1936 premiere of Toccata Seconda was his final public performance. After receiving harsh criticism regarding his music and performances, Sorabji declared that he no longer supported the performance of his music, and he placed a ban on all future performances. He became an outsider as a composer and writer due to his mixed ethnicity, reclusiveness, and anti-establishment values. He wrote and composed prolifically from the 1940s through the 1960s, but his music received very few performances. After years of procrastination and opposition, Sorabji’s good friend Frank Holliday eventually convinced him to record his music at home, which resulted in several hours of recordings in the mid-1960s. Some of these tapes were leaked and made public through radio broadcasts in the late 1960s and 1970s, which introduced his music to a much larger audience. However, it was also around this time when Sorabji lost interest in composing, and he stopped in 1968. Four years later, he received a letter from Alistair Hinton, a composition student studying at the Royal College of Music in London who was fascinated with the piece Opus Clavicembalisticum. Hinton became a close friend to Sorabji, which eventually led to his renewed impetus as a composer in 1972, and he slowly began to allow performances of his works. The first musicians to receive Sorabji’s permission to perform his music were Yonty Solomon in 1976, followed by Michael Habermann in 1977. Solomon’s series of recitals in London led to an explosion of interest in Sorabji’s life and music. Sorabji was the subject of a television documentary in 1977, and Hinton and Paul Rapoport began preserving his manuscripts in microfilm in 1978. Sorabji composed several works for piano, and two pieces of chamber music over the next six years, but his eyesight and physical ability to write deteriorated rapidly in the early 1980s, and his final composition was the Sutras sul nome dell’amico Alexis for piano in 1984. Two years later, he moved to the Marley House Nursing Home in Dorset, England where he was confined to a wheelchair. He suffered a stroke in 1988, and he died from heart failure four months later. In the months following his death, Hinton established the Sorabji Archive, and his music appeared on Kevin Bowyer’s Kaikhosru Sorabji: Organ Symphony No. 1, and John Ogdon’s album Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Opus Clavicembalisticum. Pianist Jonathan Powell’s later advocacy for Sorabji in the 2000s included ten performances of Opus Clavicembalisticum, and several premieres. Powell also recorded the albums Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Piano Sonata No. 4 and Sorabji: Sequentia Cyclica - Super Dies Irae ex Missa Pro Defunctis. Additionally, Fredrik Ullén recorded Sorabji’s 100 Transcendental Studies in a series of six albums from 2006 to 2021. In 2024, Sorabji’s music was featured on Daan Vandewalle’s Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Opus Clavicembalisticum, and Sorabji: Toccata Terza by Abel Sánchez-Aguilera.
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