William Hobbs: Orbiting Garden
Blue Griffin

An audacious collection of new music, Orbiting Garden features pianist William Hobbs performing pieces by Christos Hatzis (b. 1953) and Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988). While three of its four pieces are by the Greek-Canadian composer, the one by the Indian-English composer Sorabji, Nocturne “Djâmi” (1928), is no footnote but instead a twenty-three-minute colossus. Adding considerably to the release's value, the pieces by Hatzis, Through a Glass Darkly, Face To Face, and Orbiting Garden, have never before been recorded until now.

As different as the composers are, there are commonalities: each straddles two distinct cultures and attempts to synthesize them in his music, and, as Hobbs points out, each also reflects in his music a blend of Western classical traditions and a sensibility informed by Eastern thought. No one would seem more qualified for a project of such scope than the Austin, Texas-born Hobbs, who's distinguished himself as a piano soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician and has also worked extensively in the field of opera. Currently a music faculty member of Montclair State University and the Peabody Institute of Music, Hobbs is a graduate of the University of Colorado, Eastman School of Music, and Montclair State University, and has recorded music by Lowell Liebermann, Xavier Montsalvatge, Dave Soldier, and Ricky Ian Gordon.

Like Hobbs, the Greece-born Hatzis studied at the Eastman School and then completed his doctorate as a student of Morton Feldman's at the State University of New York before moving to Canada. In 1995, he became a faculty member at the University of Toronto and has taught there ever since. Born to an English mother and a Parsi father, Sorabji, whose piano works are said to be amongst the longest ever written for the instrument (some, apparently, lasting several hours), placed a ban on public performances of his material after a 1936 performance of a work lasted about twice as long as it should have and was met with brutal criticism. The ban was lifted forty years later, however, and interest in his music has grown steadily in the years since.

The album begins with Through a Glass Darkly (2005), its title derived, of course, from the Biblical passage “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face” and the writing inspired by the composer's reflections on memory and identity and specifically the impact of memory loss, be it age-related dementia or Alzheimer's disease-related, on the sense of self. Such psychic collapse is conveyed in the work by wrong harmonic turns, atonal interjections, and other ruptures that mount as the work develops. Tension is generated between passages of musical coherence and others that abruptly veer away from it; Hatzis's musical design brilliantly evokes the inner experience of the Alzheimer's sufferer in the way clarity of thinking is derailed and expressions of anger and frustration emerge. A central, minimalism-styled section (the work's title is also a pun on Philip Glass's name) establishes some semblance of stability, though even here intrusions come at the repeating patterns from multiple directions to attempt to throw the music off course. Clearly enunciated repetitions of a Liszt-like theme appear amidst shadowy flourishes until the work reaches an end that, aptly, feels like only a partial resolution.

Fourteen years on from Through a Glass Darkly, Hatzis wrote the four-part Face To Face, which takes as its general subject transcendence (in the composer's own words, the work “is cast in four very different movements representing four different attempts to musically depict what transcendence means and feels like to me”). The impressionistic “Encounter” alternates between dynamic splashes of energy and quieter passages that unfold in dreamlike splendour and contemplation. Regarded as the most inscrutable of the movements, “Arcanum” largely eschews chordal accompaniment and consequently seems less grounded as it advances through a series of high-velocity treatments. While the composer states that “Entanglement” wasn't written in imitation of of Chopin, it's hard not to hear parallels between the composers when Hatzis's movement exudes an intoxicating quality also present in music written by his long-ago predecessor. “Restoration” concludes the work with five minutes that attempt to pit the free will of the individual against the determinants of nature and tradition. Rather than effect some rapprochement between the poles, however, Hatzis chooses to juxtapose them and even accentuate their differences by having the right hand play rapidly flowing ‘free will' patterns and the left hand ghostlier chords that fade into silence. Resolution is, however, intimated by a closing allusion to Pachelbel's Canon that ends the work serenely.

Sorabji's Nocturne “Djâmi” unfolds as an ornate, inwardly probing odyssey characterized by, among other things, unpredictability. Instead of hewing to a standard Western approach that enables the listener to identify a clearly defined structure and narrative, Sorabji presents his composition as a kaleidoscope of contrasting moods and ideas. Hobbs likens the work's free-flowing form to Debussy, and there is something Debussy-like about the material's organic character, poetic delicacy, and exotic languor. Comparisons aside, Nocturne “Djâmi” is never less than engrossing in Hobbs's deeply engaged rendering.

After being exposed to an hour of unaccompanied solo piano, the multi-hued design of the title track is jarring and demands a reset of sorts from the listener. Orbiting Garden, which augments piano with an elaborate “Audio Playback,” was commissioned in 1988 for a concert in memory of Morton Feldman and premiered at Toronto's Music Gallery by pianist Anthony de Mare a year later. Hatzis revisited the work in April 2019 to revamp the piano part and retouch the audio component. The haunting vocal lament by Chari Polatos, a late friend of the composer's, that is in the original remains in place in the revision. A fantastic dynamo of colour and texture, the work swirls with gyroscopic momentum and drive as it powers through a series of non-standard time signatures. A quieter gesture occasionally rises to the surface, a celestial choir breath here and a horn flourish there, but for the most part the breathless sixteen-minute work races like a bullet train.

All four works, despite extreme differences in style and presentation, are riveting and realized marvelously by Hobbs in his deeply committed performances. One imagines Hatzis must be absolutely delighted by treatments that seem definitive, and one similarly imagines that if Sorabji were still with us he would be as thrilled by the pianist's Nocturne “Djâmi” rendition.

August 2025