It is certainly a great pity that this material has gotten out into the public arena, inevitably without the benefit of the myriad of necessary accompanying caveats which are well known to Sorabji scholars and followers but not necessarily to others who might encounter these presentations. Sorabji was persuaded (after quite a long time) to record some of his works privately, albeit not for general public consumption. The resultant recordings, made in the 1960s, are inevitably far from representative of how the works that he recorded should go, as he was himself the very first to admit. He was in his 70s when he made them and had not practised regularly for many years. He made no claims for them other than that he sought to get over the basic ground of what he'd written but was not at all pretending that what he'd done in these recordings constituted representative, let alone authentic, performances (which indeed they are not). The circumstances of the recordings were in themselves far from ideal in that they were made by a genuinely well-meaning but inexperienced person using some domestic recording equipment in a similarly domestic situation (that of Sorabji's own home studio, the acoustic of which was far from ideal for recording purposes) and, when one also considers that the composer did not do the necessary preparation work that one would expect were he to have set out to make recordings for general public circulation, the results are inevitably compromised, although some of them do nevertheless give some idea of the kinds of sound that he wanted (Charles Hopkins, for example, found Sorabji's recording of Gulistan, its textual inaccuracies notwithstanding, an invaluable guide to the nature of sounds and sonorities that the composer was after, when he was preparing his own recording of the piece).
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Sorabji plays his own music!