lifetime, eclipsed only by T. S. Eliot, and the composer and conductor Mervyn Vicars put Sorabji next to Richard Wagner, who he believed "had one of the finest brains since Da Vinci". By contrast, several major books on music history, including Richard Taruskin's 2005 Oxford History of Western Music, do not mention Sorabji, and he has never received official recognition from his country of birth. A 1994 review of Le jardin parfumé (1923) suggested that "the unsympathetic might say that besides not belonging in our time it equally belongs in no other place", and in 1937, one critic wrote that "one could listen to many more performances without really understanding the unique complexity of Sorabji's mind and music". In recent times, this divided reception has persisted to an extent. While some compare Sorabji to composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Messiaen, others dismiss him altogether. The pianist and composer Jonathan Powell writes of Sorabji's "unusual ability to combine the disparate and create surprising coherence". Abrahams finds that Sorabji's musical production exhibits enormous "variety and imagination" and calls him "one of the few composers of the time to be able to develop a unique personal style and employ it freely at any scale he chose". The organist Kevin Bowyer counts Sorabji's organ works, together with those of Messiaen, among the "Twentieth-Century Works of Genius". Others have expressed more negative sentiments. The music critic Andrew Clements calls Sorabji "just another 20th-century English eccentric ... whose talent never matched [his] musical ambition". The pianist John Bell Young described Sorabji's music as "glib repertoire" for "glib" performers. The musicologist and critic Max Harrison, in his review of Rapoport's book Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, wrote unfavourably about Sorabji's compositions, piano playing, writings and personal conduct and implied that "nobody cared except a few close friends". Another assessment was offered by the music critic Peter J. Rabinowitz, who, reviewing the 2015 reissue of Habermann's early Sorabji recordings, wrote that they "may provide a clue about why—even with the advocacy of some of the most ferociously talented pianists of the age—Sorabji's music has remained arcane". While saying that "it's hard not to be captivated, even hypnotized, by the sheer luxury of [his] nocturnes" and praising the "angular, dramatic, electrically crackling gestures" of some of his works, he claims that their tendency to "ostentatiously avoid the traditional Western rhetoric ... that marks out beginning, middle, and end