Log of hits
91 Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's Quintet for Piano and Four Stringed Instruments and its intended performance by Norah Drewett and the Hart House String Quartet Marc-AndrC Roberge Abstract This article attempts to reconstruct the history of what was to be the first per- formance of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's Quintet for Piano and Four Stringed Instruments (1919-20), which was scheduled to be given on 29 November 1925 at Aeolian Hall in New York by the pianist Norah Drewett and the University of Toronto's Hart House String Quartet as part of a concert sponsored by Edgard Varese's International Composers' Guild. The performance never took place for reasons that are not entirely clear but have to do mostly with the work's difficul- ties. The article also provides an introduction to the work itself, which Sorabji dedicated to his friend, the composer Philip Heseltine. Most people who have heard of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988), the Parsi composer and pianist active who lived as a recluse in England for most of his career, know that performances of his often massive and extremely difficult works have been extremely rare as a result of a so-called ban.l The thirteen scores that Sorabji published between 1921 and 1931 contain the following warning: "All rights including that of performance, reserved for all countries by the composer." The score of his 248-page Opus clavicembalisticum (1929-30), his longest and most often cited work, contains the additional admonition: "Public performance prohibited unless by express consent of the composer." Various statements in letters make it possible to say that, in the late thirties, Sorabji had decided to turn down all requests for public performance either by himself or by others. As he later indicated in a letter to the pianist Egon Petri: "I have set my face against ANY PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF MY WORK FOR GOOD AND ALL EVERYWHERE."2 It is true that he did not have to turn 92 Roberge: Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s Quintet for Piano and Four Stringed Instruments down offers very often, since they were very few and far between. The visual aspect of most scores was forbidding enough to scare potential performers away. Up to December 1936, Sorabji had been heard in public at least ten times in various cities (London, Vienna, Paris, Glasgow), giving the first performances of five works for piano solo and playing the piano part of his Trois pokmes pour chant et piano. He had also allowed two friends- the pianist Harold Rutland (1900-1977) and the organist E. Emlyn Davies (1885-1951)- to play a work each. He had not approved, however, of a performance of pars prima of his Opus clavicembalisticum by John Tobin (1 891-1960). The severe inadequacies of this performance, which took place at Cowdray Hall in London on 10 March 1936, were instrumental in bringing the composer to his decision of not allowing hearings of his music. Even though there were a few scattered performances af- ter 1936, it is only in 1976, thanks to the persistence of a number of friends, es- pecially Alistair Hinton, that Sorabji began to give permission for official per- formances to a few selected pianists, namely Yonty Solomon, Michael Haber- mann, and Geoffiey Douglas Madge.3 Since that time, other musicians (mostly pianists) have been drawn to the intricacies of Sorabji’s music and public hear- ings of several short- and medium-size works have become more freq~ent.~ A few recordings have also been produced, all offering sound proofs of the great beauty and artistic validity of the music. Sorabji never made any real efforts to promote performances of his music. It zppears that only one performance (except for Tobin’s) was organized without his close involvement, namely, the premikre of the Quintet for Piano and Quartet of Stringed Instruments (1919-20) by the pianist Norah Drewett and the Uni- versity of Toronto’s Hart House String Quartet. This performance was to be given in New York in 1925 but failed to materialize. Another performance of the same work, scheduled for October 1992 in Cambridge, did not take place either. The work is still unperformed even though it is available in print (or rather has been, since the remaining copies have been sold). It is the purpose of this article to give an account of the work and to document the sequence of events surround- ing its cancelled first Performance by the Canadian ensemble, a project that had to be filed away due to the vagaries of new music programming and to the diffi- culties posed by a new compositional idiom.5 Sorabji’s musical output consists of 11 1 works totalling more than 1 1,000 manuscript pages.6 This total can be broken down as follows: 61 works for pi- ano (including 7 transcriptions), 3 for organ, ll for piano and orchestra, 7 for or- chestra (with or without voices), 7 for chamber ensemble (including 2 with
