Kaikhosru Sorabji's 100 Transcendental Studies took five years to write, and pianist Fredrik Ullén's complete recorded performance of the studies took even longer: 14 years. In his defense, the pieces are fiendishly difficult, with some of them called unplayable, and Ullén also holds down a full-time job as a professor of neuroscience at Sweden's Karolinska Institute. Listen to the very first track, where a tango rhythm quickly devolves into a series of very tricky cross-rhythms, for an idea of the challenges facing Ullén. ...
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Kaikhosru Sorabji's 100 Transcendental Studies took five years to write, and pianist Fredrik Ullén's complete recorded performance of the studies took even longer: 14 years. In his defense, the pieces are fiendishly difficult, with some of them called unplayable, and Ullén also holds down a full-time job as a professor of neuroscience at Sweden's Karolinska Institute. Listen to the very first track, where a tango rhythm quickly devolves into a series of very tricky cross-rhythms, for an idea of the challenges facing Ullén. He has surmounted them admirably, and his deliberate approach to these pieces, something like what one might expect if Liszt had lived in the 20th century and found himself a misunderstood eccentric, has paid off. He gets the attractiveness of the Studies as a way into the work of Sorabji, who has been admired by many and equally often critically dismissed. Whichever camp the listener may fall into, the Studies, as it were, break the often gigantist Sorabji down into manageable...
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