"Sorabji's mother (Madeleine Mathilde Sorabji, 1874?-1959) seems to have been a soprano of Spanish-Sicilian descent who apparently abandoned a singing career for family reasons. Sorabji's unpublished essay 'Concert Going Memories,' devoted mainly to singers and their art, mentions her having sung the role of Marguerite in a French production of Berlioz's 'Le Damnation de Faust' although he was too young at the time to recall specific details. Sorabji testifies to his mother's encouragement of his attending lieder recitals where he heard some of the great singers of that time, including 'the incomparable Louise Kirkby Lunn,' of whose performance he wrote of the 'utterly unique beauty of (her) voice [...] like purple velvet [...] the incomparable technique and sheer singing mastery, the transcendent distinction and beauty of her performance (which) is as vivid in my memory as it was then' (at least half a century later). Sorabji said that his mother also played piano and organ and gave him his first piano lessons when he was aged about six. There can be little doubt that she also instilled in her only child a love of fine singing which remained with him for the rest of his long life; it is reflected in many of his published reviews and essays.
"Sorabji was no child prodigy in the conventional sense; whilst he seems to have recognised early on that his future lay in some kind of career in music, its precise directions remained unclear until his early twenties. As a boy, he absorbed large amounts of baroque, classical and romantic repertoire but his enquiring mind also led him to team much about the newest trends in music. Assimilating substantial quantities of contemporary European music was no mean feat in the inward-looking unadventurous environment of Edwardian England, a pre-gramophone age where such work was performed very rarely or not at all. Considered a multi-racial outsider (his father was a Parsi from Bombay), Sorabji must have cut an odd figure in those days, investigating with irrepressible excitement the most recent creations of composers such as Debussy, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Ravel, Bartók, Strauss, Medtner and Schönberg. He conveyed with unremitting enthusiasm the results of his discoveries and endeavoured to persuade various powers-that-were of the urgent need for such music to be heard by English audiences. There was even a story that, when barely 14, the intrepid Sorabji made a solo pilgrimage to Essen to hear the world premiere of Mahler's Sixth Symphony conducted by the composer; when I questioned him on this in the 1970s, he broke into a broad grin, obviously enjoyed the tantalising effect of his deliberate refusal to confirm or deny this rumour and gave away nothing beyond the remark 'Good story, isn't it!'.
"A gifted pianist but pathologically reluctant performer, Sorabji was unsure what to do with this knowledge; for a time he contemplated a career as a critic and indeed managed to pursue one parallel to his life as a composer until his mid-fifties, contributing articles and reviews to 'The New Age' and 'The New English Weekly' and publishing two books of essays. Around 1915, while planning a book on Ravel, he seemed to stumble accidentally on the idea of composing his own music, a fact all the more remarkable when one considers the sheer prolixity of his output over the following seven decades. As a composer, then, Sorabji was a very late starter; although his first music was composed when he was about the same age as was Beethoven when he published his Op. 1 piano trios, whereas Beethoven had already completed many works before his first publication, it seems that Sorabji wrote nothing at all before the age of 22.
"Given his love of the voice, it might seem curious that he wrote few songs and no stage works, preferring instead to direct the majority of his energies to keyboard writing. Performance of his entire song œuvre would, for example, occupy barely one quarter of that required to present just one of his large piano works, the famous 'Opus Clavicembalisticum'. Sorabji devoted his first two years of composition entirely to songs for voice and piano and to piano concertos. With two exceptions, all his songs are for voice and piano and most feature soprano.
"Sorabji the song composer seemed particularly drawn to the poetry of the French symbolists and their English contemporaries such as Ernest Dowson. His first ten songs were composed during World War I when his harmonic language had yet to develop into the Busoni- and Szymanowski-influenced yet highly individual one of his maturity. His principal examples at this stage seem to have been Cyril Scott, Scriabin, Ravel, Ornstein and even Roslavets. Although it is uncertain whether his youthful contemporary music researches drew the last of these into his circle of acquaintance, his contemporary writings evidence his awareness of Ornstein's more experimental music, he certainly attended Scriabin's London appearances in 1913 and was later to meet Roussel (and possibly also Ravel) in Paris. (Ornstein was, incidentally, a close contemporary of Sorabji and died only in February 2002).
"A consequence of Sorabji's desire for personal privacy and consequent reclusivity was a reluctance to speak or write about his own music; this accounts for the dearth of recorded interview material. Even in the early days, he devoted little energy to securing performances of his music; only three of the songs written during his 20s reached performance by 1921; others not until the late 1970s and 1990s; only those specified below have received public performance at all. Every song on the present CD is a recorded première.
"Of all Sorabji's articles on singing, singers and vocal repertoire, it is arguably 'The Great French Song Writers' ('Mi Contra Fa', 1947) which points most closely to many of the persuasions in his own song-writing and provides the greatest key to his thinking and ideals as a song composer.
"[...] The 1941 songs almost conclude Sorabji's career as songwriter, although he continued to compose for at least another 40 years. On the strength of his finest contributions to the singer's repertoire, it seems a pity that, for so much of Sorabji's creative life, songwriting appears almost to have assumed the role of what the poet Robert Frost called 'the path not taken'." (Alistair Hinton. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Elizabeth Farnum, Margaret Kampmeier
1. Trois Poèmes: Correspondances
2. Trois Poèmes: Crépuscule Du Soir Mystique
3. Trois Poèmes: Pantomime
4. Chrysilla
5. Roses Du Soir
6. The Poplars
7. L'Heure Exquise
8. Vocalise
9. I Was Not Sorrowful
10. L'Étang
11. Hymne À Aphrodite
12. Apparition
13. (Trois Chants): Le Faune
14. (Trois Chants): Les Chats
15. (Trois Chants): La Dernière Fête Galante
16. Trois Fêtes Galantes: L'Allée
17. Trois Fêtes Galantes: À La Promenade
18. Trois Fêtes Galantes: Dans La Grotte
19. L'Irrémédiable
20. Arabesque
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