Ah . . . now that is most interesting. The Chromatic Fantasia . . . a strange thing that . . . I must admit it had not crossed my mind before reading Mr. H's response. I will have another listen to both works and come back.
In regard to the whiff of "jazz," is that not simply something almost inescapably pervading the spirit of so much produced in the early '-twenties - "why should I care amid the general insanity?" - "who cares about wrong notes - the more the merrier" - that sort of thing? Or have I got that wrong?
You've certainly gotten it entirely wrong in Sorabji's case; for all the value that he placed upon the ability to improvise (and the great tradition of that activity), he detested anything "jazz"-oriented with quite disproportionate vehemence, once describing some of Gershwin's concert works to me as mere "barlines with the same music music either side of them" and, when I asked what he meant by that, he simply said, "the man seemed incapable of taking any idea, banal or otherwise, on a journey anywhere - he says two words, then he says them again a bit differently, then he does the same again over and over and then he stops", adding that "organic development seems not only unnecessary but anathema to him". These were his words; they are not mine. At the same time, he expressed immense admiration for Cole Porter and regarded him (as a song composer) as a kind of American Poulenc only with greater subtlety. I think that you've also got it wrong in the sense that "the spirit of so much produced in the early 20s" touched Sorabji but little (other than the extent to which much of it was wont to irritate him); it's not as simple as that, of course (such things never are!) but, for the sake of argument, if one seeks to compare what, say, Milhaud, Stravinsky and others were doing (especially in the environs of Paris) at that time with Sorabji's piano works such as
Le Jardin Parfumé, Toccata No. 1 and Sonata No. 4 and with his First Organ Symphony, it will take no time at all to realise that these two phenomena were worlds apart, although it's also fair to point out that Sorabji's 1920s music was likewise at a great distance from anything else that was going on in English music in those days.
The opening movement of Toccata II does is indeed have a sense of controlled improvisatory exploration about it - so (albeit in very different ways and to very different ends) do works such as
Le Jardin Parfumé,
Gulistān, etc. - but then what's wrong with that? I think also that you need to bear in mind that you're referring here to just one movement in a multi-movement work. Admittedly, Sorabji does not go in for the kinds of highly concentrated intricate motivic/thematic relationship developments in order to achieve the sense of organic growth that one might associate with the Schönberg of the D minor quartet (taking as he did for his examples Liszt, Wagner and Brahms), but then for one thing he wasn't Schönberg and, for another, the two composers did at least place value on the achievement of organic development; it's a case of quite different ways of arriving at not dissimilar results (technically speaking, that is - the actual music sounds very different, of course). Sorabji is still best known for very large-scale pieces, which is in some ways rather a pity because some two-thirds of his works would fit confortably into concert programmes of more or less conventional length; however, when writing his large works, he was always acutely conscious of the micro as well as the macro and maintained a strong sense of the requirement to ensure that each event in the course of his narrative was correctly proportioned and occurred at just the right time, even though, in order to do this, he did very little preliminary sketching.