Sorabji returns to the spotlight with the premiere recording of his Third Toccata, a modest (by Sorabji standards) two-hour piano tome that we’ve distilled into 30 tidy minutes to sample alongside Lachenmann’s My Melodies (noise music meets Boulez), Josh Modney’s Ascending Primes (which reminds us of Nancarrow and Carla Bley) and Alice Coltrane’s 1971 Carnegie Hall concert (in its first complete recording). We honor Gerhard Samuel for his 100th birthday with a backward-looking orchestral requiem, and revisit historical gems by Jeanne Lee and Joe McPhee through our “50 years ago in the avant-garde feature”. New and unusual instrumentational configurations from Langham Research Centre (with John Butcher), Pasquale Corrado (channeling Dante), Rhodri Davies (interpreted through Scottish Smallpipes) and David Leon’s Bird’s Eye trio (featuring sax, drums and gayageum), plus the first recording of Cage’s Music for Three by a horn trio, rounds out this ambitious playlist.
