Geoffrey Douglas

A work with a name like this can only be unusual. The opus in question is a three-part solo piano epic, lasting a shade under four hours and of a complexity to match. Combine an all-night raga sequence with Bach's Art of Fugue and you're getting close. Is it worth the listen? Yes, if you want to give your heart and mind–not just your brain–a real workout. For all his outsize demands, Sorabji was a front-rank pianist, who understood technique as a physical end to spiritual means. There are stretches of manic complexity here, but also passages of real poetry: try the lengthy "Interludium primum" which opens Part 2, or many of the 81(!) variations which follow the magisterial "Passacaglia" in Part 3. It's music which cries out for transcendental virtuosity, and Geoffrey Douglas Madge gives it just that. He gave four performances over six years and this Chicago one from 1983 assumed mythic status among those who heard it. Remastered for CD release, it is awe-inspiring in its grasp of what's gone into this music: the audience clearly living it with the pianist every step of the way. Hear it for yourself, then why not run the marathon or climb Everest for relaxation?

This CD is a good one with which to approach Nikos Skalkottas (1904-49) if his music is unfamiliar to you and you prefer orchestral to instrumental music. Unless you are totally allergic to serial music I would also recommend playing the three works in reverse order for an exciting plunge into the deep end! The Ouverture Concertante from the mid-1940s is in Skalkottas's most developed serial method, but there really is no need to bother about that. It is brilliant and exuberant, with solo winds, cello, timpani featured, and a group of four solo violins.

Orkest de Volharding is one of the longest established European new music ensembles, created in 1972 by composers Louis Andriessen and Willem Breuker to perform one work, Andriessen's piece De Volharding. Its sister ensemble, Hoketus, has long fallen by the wayside, but Orkest de Volharding (literally the Perseverance Orchestra) presses on in a prodigious outpouring of concerts and recordings. They remain little known in the United States, despite having recorded works of Andriessen, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Torke for major labels distributed in America.

Busoni needs listening to in extenso, troughs (not deep ones) as well as peaks. He was the first to acknowledge that his mature style was late in developing, but he was no late starter: the earliest music here, and pretty accomplished it is too, was written at 12 years old and by the age of 18 he had written the remarkable Variations and Fugue on Chopin's C minor Prelude, a tour de force of late nineteenth-century pianism and sonorous inventiveness.

In past centuries, almost the only way to get to know musical masterpieces from other genres than the piano, was through transcriptions. Orchestral concerts were rare. It was not so easy to hear performances. Just imagine, if you didn’t live in the same city as Bach you might have to travel by horse and carriage to hear his works and then possibly only one performance. You would have to travel far in the most uncomfortable and dangerous manner to hear a cantata. Or, in a later era, for instance a symphony. The radio and recording industry has changed everything, it’s impossible for us today to imagine what an enterprise it was!

Ferruccio Busoni’s Elegies (1908) and An die Jugend (1909) are experimental pieces that explore new pathways in the composer’s harmonic language and artistic evolution. Elegies is an aesthetic manifesto, a wish for a turning point in the composer’s creative evolution, but also, more ambitiously, in all future music. Ferruccio Busoni believed that music should be, as he commented to the critic and composer Hans Pfitzner, “well meant and full of peace,” but this did not preclude the provocative gesture of the Elegies’ exceptional harmonic variety, brought about by new chordal progressions and juxtapositions and giving an impression of a potentially inexhaustible tonality. An die Jugend is a collection of four pieces written in 1909 and published as four separate ‘books’ in the same year. These pieces have some stylistic features with Busoni’s first Elegy, while showing even further experimentation on the composer’s part. Carlo Grante performs these works on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano.

The latter half of the twentieth century was a period of turbulence – both artistically and culturally – and produced a wealth of provocative and often divisive music; much of which we are still coming to terms with, and much which has hugely influenced today’s pop culture and its music. 20C: Shaping the Century Volume II surveys a musical landscape of what are sometimes disparate compositional styles, and makes the repertoire accessible to everyone with an interest in this rich musical heritage. Decca’s and DG’s exceptionally-balanced survey of the music of twentieth century features one masterpiece from each featured composer, five composers per decade.Together this presents iconic works by 25 of the most iconic composers of the years 1950-2000.

Over a remarkably long and illustrious career, Camille Saint-Saëns thrilled audiences around the world as a pianist and organist, shaped the course of musical life in France, and enriched a multitude of genres with some 600 works, all bearing witness to the mastery of his craft. Setting his best-known compositions in their dazzlingly diverse context, this edition invites exploration and discovery. It spans more than a century of recording history, encompassing a host of great instrumentalists, singers, conductors and orchestras, many of them from France. Setting the pace, in performances from as early as 1904, is the composer himself.