The International Historical Organ Recording Collection

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji – Organ Symphony No. 1 (1922/23) “For those interested in such matters, Kaikhos ru Shapurji Sorabji was born in Chingford, Essex, England on 14 August 1892; his father was a Zoroastrian Parsi civil engineer and his mother English (for a long time, until the work of Sean Vaughan Owen, she was reputed to be part Sicilian, part Spanish). He spent most of his life in England. From his early ’teens he developed an insatiable appetite for the latest developments in contemporary European and Russian music and went to great lengths to obtain the latest scores of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Schönberg, Skryabin, Rakhmaninov and others at a time and in a country where almost all such music was largely unknown and unrecognized. Of an independent and uniquely curious nature, it is perhaps unsurprisin g given the pre-War English environment that his education, both general and musical, was mostly private. For a composer as prolific as he was soon to become, he w...