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Well, Alwyn and Rubbra were born in Northampton, apparently.

But, far more importantly for British television viewers of a certain age, so was Delia Derbyshire.

[TONIGHT]

The broadcast of the final movement does not seem to have taken place does it?

It is advertised here:

http://www.concertzender.nl/programmagids.php?month=0&date=2012-05-23

as due to begin at four in the morning, so I set my computer to start at half past three and stop at seven (since I believe the movement takes three hours. After a couple of hours my internet connection broke down (regrettably a common occurrence), but during that couple of hours nothing I would call "music" was broadcast, and certainly nothing by Sorabji.

In fact on closer inspection there are TWO programmes advertised as due to begin at four in the morning!

I think that's a mistake, Sydney (and clearly not the first Concertzender have made over these Sorabji broadcasts). The broadcast of the third movement (along with Bowyer's commercial recording of Sorabji's 1st organ symphony and more of Bowyer's Alkan recordings) is due to take place at midnight (Dutch time) TONIGHT.

By stepping out after one hour you have missed the 2nd Movement, perhaps you would quite like at least the initial parts thereof! If you go to the Sorabji site's Forum, you may find under the posts regarding this work some files from someone who recorded the broadcast and offers them in seperate bits; I think the 2nd file will be the beginning of Mvt 2.
I quite like your 'vision' of OS1 mvt 1+2!

Feldman SQ2 live? Neuhhhhhh.....

Gijs - those five separate files over at the Sorabji Forum are .rar files that need to be downloaded individually but then "unpacked" simultaneously (with zip software of choice). If they're unzipped individually, the files come out broken, but if unzipped simultaneously, they're automatically reconstituted into complete files ("Introduction", "Movement 1", "Movement 2" and "applause"). I tried to do them individually two days ago, but couldn't get anywhere, so tried them simultaneously 24 hours ago and they came out perfectly, and indeed I'm listening to the marvellous 2nd movement right now...

[two copies]

I once heard from someone in the know that the big HMV on Oxford St in London (the one between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road, rather than the one near Bond St that isn't there any more!) deemed things sufficiently popular to stock them physically in the classical department if they sold even two copies a year!

Is gurning a good thing or a bad thing? 

It's fine on radio  , but it's rather off-putting "live".

I saw Knussen and Josefowicz give the world premiere of the Colin Matthews concerto I mentioned upthread. Honestly, the ridiculously extreme facial contortions Ms Josefowicz went through were frankly bizarre, though thankfully the piece was strong enough to hold the attention in spite of her! (though she's a bloomin' fine musician)

I don't know about "greatest", but at the Ojai Festival a few years back, they performed the VC of Oliver Knussen.  I was pretty impressed with it.

Knussen's conducting it, with Leila Josefowicz fiddling (and inevitably gurning away to her usual extremes!), at London's Barbican early next year.

In response to a couple of nominations above:

• Adams' violin concerto - it's fine, though I prefer his electric violin concerto "The Dharma at Big Sur" for its sheer high-spirited bonkersness. In the film "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould", there's a bit where Gould describes himself as an ecstatic loon. It's a phrase that comes to mind whenever I hear "Dharma".
• Corigliano's violin concerto - it's okay. The opening movement, "The Red Violin Chaconne", was a stand-alone piece that Corigliano made from his oscar-winning score to "The Red Violin" (coincidentally by the same director as "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould"!). That chaconne is a remarkable piece of work, I think. The rest of the concerto was tacked on some years later, and doesn't really do justice to the opening movement, for my money.
• Pettersson's 2nd violin concerto - yes yes yes

A couple of my own favourites to add to the list, then...

Feldman - Violin and Orchestra
Hillborg - Violin Conceto
Lutoslawski - Chain II
Matthews (Colin, that is) - Violin Concerto

Cage simply doesn't specify a particular instrument al all, it just states that the piece can be performed by any instrumentalist or or number of instrumentalists, and may be of any duration.

Perhaps someone could make an arrangement for full orchestra.  With full percussion, vibraphones and bass sarussaphone! > <

As the score already allows for that, I don't think it needs any arranging. Besides, it's already been done! 

[closed]

I don't wish to be pedantic, but 4'33 is officially a piano piece. The 'pianist' is supposed to walk onto the platform, open the piano's lid and sit there, all part of the 'performance'.

Sorry to be doubly pedantic, but it isn't!

The score describes David Tudor's first performance of the piece as a piano piece, but Cage simply doesn't specify a particular instrument al all, it just states that the piece can be performed by any instrumentalist or or number of instrumentalists, and may be of any duration. Additionally, the note on the score also says that Tudor closed the lid to indicate the start of each movement, and only opened the lid again to indicate the movement had ended.

In terms of Mozart, there's an enormous amount of "unsung" material, obviously - given that there are many, many "sung" works in Mozart's oeuvre, of course, the "unsung" probably run into the hundreds. Inevitably, a lot of it is pleasant enough, but perhaps rather workaday compared to his best work... That said, even amongst the juvenalia, it's fascinating how early the "early" stuff starts to sound like bona fide Wolfgang.

Anyway, as for an actual unsung work, the one I'd nominate is, I suspect, "undersung" rather than genuinely "unsung", but if you look through all the various collections of Mozart's "greatest hits", you'll never see anyone mention a recording of the organ fantasia K608, but for my money it's Mozart's greatest work by a country mile. I wonder if the fact that it's for (mechanical) organ is why it falls off the radar somewhat, but it's a staggering piece of music. My theory as to why is that if you look at Mozart's letters around the time, it's a work he loathed composing to commission, so it was something he worked through at speed, and during some of his darker days, so there's no sense of politeness or of Mozart censoring himself in the music. It remains, for me, one of the very few glimpses of the real Mozart not hiding behind a facade. It's a dark, disturbing journey, as epic in its 12 short minutes as anything in (e.g.) Mahler, and it deserves to be more widely sung.

Busoni's piano arrangement for four-hand is pretty special too!

Stunning for me.Hardly someone here in Romania remembers Cuclin...

But then, isn't the "arts college" in Cuclin's home town of Galati named after him? I don't think educational establishments tend to get named after people no-one regards as worthy of being remembered, or even who were persona non grata in the eyes of the state.

If anything, I suspect Cuclin's apparent obscurity is mostly down to a sort of "wrong place wrong time" situation. Let's be honest, his music is a tad conservative (I don't mean that as a criticism!), and if we consider the case of Kabalevsky in relation to Shostakovich, perhaps that might go some way to explaining why Cuclin has fallen out of favour. Also, I suspect, the apparent lack of availabilty of scores might have something to do with it. When I first encountered Cuclin's name a little over 18 months ago, I did a whole heap of research on him, and could only find evidence of the physical existence of a mere handful of scores in libraries around the world (well, lbraries with a web presence, at least!). Even the USA's Library of Congress database (the world's biggest library) only had two or three references to him; and a work colleague's partner was recently in Romania on business and I asked him to see if he could find any scores in Romania, and he returned empty handed. In some ways, that absence of scores is not dissimilar from the position Sorabji's music was in some 30 years ago (a handful of published scores that started to finally sell out after 40 or 50 years in print as an ironic consequence of a growing interest in his music), except unlike Sorabji, Cuclin hasn't yet acquired any indefatigable champions to doggedly work on his music in spite of a general lack of commercial interest. If Cuclin had people like Ogdon, Powell, Ullen and Bowyer striving to make his music better known, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now!

Unfortunately, we don't, and all we've currently got are the old Electrecord records, which really aren't very good. Enough of the quality of the music shines out, I think, to show it's worth exploring, but the sound quality and the performances are terrible. Particularly in the 13th, which I think is one of the worst performances of any work committed to vinyl I've ever come across. I respectfully disagree with Malito about it being a boring work - I think it sounds like it's got potential, but that record is simply terrible, and doesn't really allow for a fair assessment of the work.

Anyway, thanks for Malito and AS for making the 16th available - about to download and give it a spin.

Sorabji fan for over a decade.... sorry I haven't heard one of the recordings, commercial or otherwise, of no.3 yet

I wouldn't be too sorry about that. It's not really one of Sorabji's best works, by any means (it's better than number 2, though).

...or Medtner's Night Wind (as played by Ogdon).

If you ever get a chance to hear Jonathan Powell play it live, JUMP at that chance. I've heard him play it twice in concert - "staggering" just about covers it!

Speaking of Powell, I suspect the work of Sorabji doesn't have many fans round here, but Sorabji's massive 4th sonata would be somewhere near the top of my list of C20 sonatas.

Lemmen's "Grand Fantasia in E Minor - The Storm" for organ - here's a youtube link to a 1927 recording by Harry Goss-Custard.

A vote here for Goldenweiser's "Contrapuntal Sketches", opus 12, a cycle of 24 pieces (structured Prelude, Fugue, Canon, Prelude, Fugue, Canon etc) in all the keys. Marvellous recording by Jonathan Powell on the Toccata Classics label.