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Neat! The violin sonatas are among my favorites of his works, so it's gratifying to see how often they're now beginning to be recorded

These three sonatas are indeed splendid works, the second especially and none has received the attention that they so richly deserve over the decades since they were composed, although they're each available in several performances on YouTube. Yes, all three do present serious challenges for the performers but then so do many of the composer's rather better known piano sonatas!

Yes, an interesting and gravely under-represented composer indeed - and to have Clare Hammond as advocate is wonderful!

Excellent playing as ever from the remarkable Mark Viner!

Whilst it's now almost six years since this monumental work was last discussed here, I should update by mentioning that it was played last year to inagurate the new Klais organ at University of Iowa before the largest audience ever to attend a Sorabji performance. That record has now been well and truly overtaken, as Kevin Bowyer is now scheduled to play it once more in the fabulous Great Hall of Hamburg's prestigious Elbphilharmonie on 20 May this year, commencing at 18.00, but don't all rush for tickets, since this event sold out 4½ months ago - and the hall holds at least 2,000! Returns might be available on the day. I do not yet know if it will be recorded for broadcast.

Oh, I love them and consider it a crime that so many have been destroyed or left to rot in the UK.

Going to the cinema would be a far better experience if the Mighty Wurlitzer were to be re introduced

As once used in certain circles to be said about those instruments by those seeking to answer others who wondered what they were - "Wurlitzer", or rahter "Well, it's a..."...

I'm not convinced that showings of Silence of the Lambs, Yentl, A Fish called Wanda, Marnie or Quantum of Solace (just to pick five entirely at random) would have benefited from the presence of a Mighty Wurlitzer (why are they always "mighty"?), any more than any of the movies of the 1920s when shown in a particular Glasgow cinema actually did benefit from the attentions of a pianist playing on the 1896 Model C Steinway grand that was sold to a firm in London who in turn sold it to Sorabji in 1931 and which you have yourself sat near once no so many years ago...

I vote for Max Bruch's 1918 String Quintet, op. posth., which I have in a CD recording by the Ensemble Ulf Hoelscher. The music has a combination of strenuousness and lyrical beauty that suggests Brahms, both in overall effect and quality. The melodies are, however, very individual and sharply defined, and there is a compelling drive and structural unity, achieved out of very complex elements.

I'm grateful to this thread for introducing me to the Lachner and Draeseke quintets. The Lachner strikes me as a very superior piece of craftsmanship--no more, no less. I don't know quite what to make of the Draeseke (my first experience of this composer). It is very experimental for a contemporary of Brahms, but the individual musical ideas don't grab me at all and, after two hearings, I'm still finding the whole thing rather shapeless. Still, I must explore further.

The Bruch seems to me to win hands down, and I urge others to try it.

Well, some people have indeed "tried it" - the medium itself, that is, as distinct from the Bruch work per se - and it has indeed been known that, like Dvořák (in his Op. 97), the choice of double bass as the instrument to add to the customary string quartet ensemble rather than the far more customary second viola (Mozart and others) or second cello (most other string quintet composers) has been made and, in certain cases, the work concerned arguably be classifiable as "Romantic" - but, since there may be some risk that some such composers have written such works post-1918, it might nevertheless be better to draw a veil thereover here unless anyone can think of any other such works that were composed before that date...

Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking the time to post that helpful description.

You're very welcome - and I'm pleased if indeed it is found to be helpful; it's such a wonderful piece that if only I were a pianist I'd be playing it whenever and wherever I could!

Well, I'm sure it does explain itself when one hears it - but for those who don't possess the piece, further explanation is usually very helpful. Thanks, then, for setting the piece in context.

Szymanowski's three piano sonatas are very different from one another in character, coming as they do from distinctly contrasting periods of his sadly all too short creative life, although the one thing that they all have in common is that they each conclude with a fugue; those of the second and third sonats have quite quirky but highly effective subjects. The first sonata is a product of the composer's early days and displays its immature clumsiness rather too obviously. The second represents a great advance on it, with its turbulent, passionate and finely wrought first movement followed by a delightfully imaginative set of variations (as in the second symphony) that then lead without a break to the fugue that ends with a massively triumphant coda; the principal influences on it are Richard Strauss, Max Reger and Joseph Marx, but his own distinct character and persona are already making their marks in ths work. The third would appear to be outside the scope of discussion here so I will refrain from further reference to it, great as it is.

Well, that's more or less what I meant, actually. The symphony was composed at around the same time as the sonata but most of the revisions were made with the help of his friend Gregorz Fitelberg (who had conducted its première) some two decades later. I do not have the precise details of the differences to hand but, according to Jim Samson (The Music of Szymanowski; Kahn & Averill, London, 1980, p.58), "most of the revisions concerned orchestration, but there were some structural changes, notably the removal of an entire variation from the second movement", to which statement he appends the footnote "Szymanowski approved Fitelberg's mnor revisions to the orchestration of the first movement but died before the other movements were completed".

Expliquez, s'il vous plaît!

I would have thought - or at the very least hoped - that the work would "explain" itself in terms of its "must hear" qualities; it dates from around the time of the composer's fine and also rather underperformed second symphony and shares some characteristics with it.

Pourquoi?

Pourquoi pas?!

Szymanowski: Piano Sonata No. 2

FWIW, I think the latter explanation is the correct one. Commentators on contacts with various sorts of discarnate entities (such as religious apparitions, encounters with aliens, etc.) note that they always have one thing in common, namely deception. Thus, depending on the context, they may pose as a particular religious figure (work this out for yourself!), or as a visitor from outer space, or (in  RB's case) as a composer. In my locality - a small seaside town with an elderly population - we have a lot of mediums who visit claiming to be able to put the bereaved in touch with their deceased relatives. They may be sincere, as no doubt RB was, but they are in fact themselves being deceived and are perpetrating deception upon others.

I note with interest from the Wikipedia article that RB's family was involved in mediumistic practices...

Who knows? You may be right about this, entirely or in part and, as such, it could even be that both answers apply here. Certainly your last statement above is correct and cannot sensibly be denied. I remain puzzled, however, as to what really did happen and how.

Interesting and rational thoughts both, although I incline towards the first of them, despite that seeming to be a kind of cop-out. Something caused her work to be possible and, whatever that may have been, bringing her and the work itself under the microscope all those years ago did little if anything to reveal it; it's just unfortunate - especially in terms of the implications of fantasising and fraud on her part (the former of which seems somewhat unfair and the latter wholly unjustified) - that the names of certain well-known composers got dragged into it, for the results, which would have done none of them any favours, accordingly did Brown herself few favours! Why was it only Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Beethoven and the others with whom she presumed herself to be in contact? The Nell Rose piece opens with a reference to Stravinsky, who was, I think, the only 20th century composer who found his innocent way into this collection of Brown communicants, yet I'm not aware that she ever tried to "receive" any new works from him.

Easy as it might be for some to dismiss her and her work as mere fakery, these can surely be little doubt that something as yet undiscovered and not yet understood was going on from time to time, but the prospect that Beethoven, Liszt et al were in any sense behind it or indeed involved in it in any way whatsoever is not only absurd but might also discourage any bona fide neuroscientific research into whatever phenomenon it may have been, which would be unfortunate. That at one time or another H Menuhin, Kentner, Searle and Bennett seemed to some degree to be taken in by it (is there any record of Y Menuhin's thoughts on it?) still seems odd - Searle's especially, perhaps, given that he was one of the previous century's most distinguished Liszt scholars...

One of the problems here is that Brown, who had scant musical experience or technical expertise of any kind, might be classified by some alongside the likes of Eric Fenby, who had plenty of each, despite the obvious differences that Brown claimed her work to result from "communications" from deceased composers whereas Fenby's needed to make no claims for itself and resulted from communications from the alive but ill and dying Delius. I wonder what Fenby thought about Brown and her work. I would not wish to argue with Richard Rodney Bennett, but I cannot help but question how what Brown did came about and, whatever the answer to that might have been (and it could well have emerged as a consequence of some as yet insufficiently researched neurological condition of not inconsiderable interest), it certainly wasn't ever any kind of direct contact with the deceased composers themselves and, if it had been, one would have little option but to despair about the Alzheimer-like symptoms that would appear to befall composers following their demise...