I personally think Godowsky's greatest music lies in the Sonata, Passacaglia and Strauss transcripts with glimmers of great ingenuity here and there.
For me, his best is in the Strauss arrangements, although there are some nice short pieces in Walzermasken and Trikontameron and elsewhere. The sonata and passacaglia sound like empty gesturing to me - they are unconvincing as music.
Hamelin may be part of the problem there - his old Canadian recording of the passacaglia was my introduction to that work, and no matter how many times I listen to it, it simply goes in one ear and out the other without leaving a trace. It one of those peculiar Hamelin efforts where "we get all the notes, but where's the music?", as one critic memorably said.
But, eventually, I got the score, and after reading through it a few times, the piece still strikes me as a great deal of posturing in an attempt to sound like "important" music, but it is musically so thin as to be almost nonexistent. Ditto the sonata.
