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http://www.concertzender.nl/programmagids/?date=2014-08-21&month=0&detail=72730

Many thanks for posting this!

For those who will be interested in this (as anyone will be if they care at all about the piano!), I have just heard the following.

A Sorabjian mini-Fest is about to take place at the Poncho Concert Hall at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, USA.

On Sunday 7 September at 7:00 p.m., Reinier van Houdt will give a recital including extracts from Piano Symphony No. 4 (which he premièred in Utrecht, Netherlands in 2003).

On Tuesday 28 October at 8:00 p.m., Jonathan Powell will give the following programme:

Sorabji: Piano Sonata No. 1
Albeniz: Iberia, Book IV
Sorabji: Le Jardin Parfumé
Szymanowski: Piano Sonata No. 2

On Friday 31 October at noon, Jonathan Powell will give a Piano Masterclass and, finally, on Saturday 1 November at 2:00 p.m., he will give his third complete performance of Sorabji’s Sequentia Cyclica super Dies Iræ.

No one interested in attending any of this will presumably face the prospect of being anything other than "Sleepless in Seattle"!...

Many thanks for the link - I would have missed this otherwise. Gripping stuff - this seems to me to be Sorabji at his best.

It provokes me to wonder, though, what is the significance of the title, or to put it simply, what, to Sorabji, was the distinction between a "piano symphony" and a "piano sonata", or for that matter, an "opus"? Is it the intention that for a sonata, the writing is more pianistic, and for a symphony, more orchestral? And if so, to what extent is this perceptible in the music?

One thing strikes me is the chronology of these pieces: Sorabji gave up writing piano sonatas around the time he started writing solo symphonies, so perhaps the latter superceded the former?

Direct link, bypassing the "player":

http://streams.greenhost.nl/cz/cz/rod/20140821-0100.mp3 (http://streams.greenhost.nl/cz/cz/rod/20140821-0100.mp3)

Size: 431,999,622 bytes
Duration: six hours

To download it to your computer in half an hour or so just use that link with curl:

curl -o sorabsym6.mp3 http://streams.greenhost.nl/cz/cz/rod/20140821-0100.mp3

Eternal gratitude to the superbly talented Jonathan Powell for all the premières he has given us - the first time is the time that has meaning, the time we will always remember!

I can only echo the praise for the magnificent talent and tenacity of Jonathan Powell :)

As do I. The prospect that any one pianist would ever get as much of Sorabji's music under his fingers as he has is one that I would never have credited until he came along and demontrated that it is possible; none of the superhuman challenges posed by some of it seem to daunt him and his repertoire has by now embraced well over 24 hours' worth of Sorabji in toto. Just being able to get around and through this music at the piano and have the immense stamina, mental and physical, to keep it going is a monumental achievement in itself, but to create performances that draw audiences in as he does and give them such uniquely memorable experiences of this work is really quite something else again.

To say nothing of the bladder control ;)

Indeed(!) - although the only cases where that could really present a problem are the second and third movements of Sorabji's Organ Symphony No. 2 and the third movement of Organ Symphony No. 3 in which the duration of unbroken stretches of music is such as to suggest the potential of an urological nightmare; most of his other lengthy works do break down into more or less manageable sections separated by intervals.