I gave the world premiere of Sorabji’s Toccata terza at the Willem Twee toonzaal (‘s-Hertogenbosch) on 3 July 2022, 11 a.m. The duration of the concert was about 2 hours plus one intermission. There was a pre-concert talk by Gijs van der Meijden at 10 a.m.

Toccata terza is one of the most ambitious piano works written by Sorabji – or any other composer – in the 1950s. Shortly after its composition the manuscript – the only copy of the work – seemed to disappear from the face of Earth. No one knew anything about the whereabouts of the score for almost sixty years and the work was believed to be lost – until, very unexpectedly, it was found in 2019 in a private collection. It is this work, so long shrouded in mystery, that will be heard in this concert for the first time, following the publication of my critical edition of the work by the Sorabji Archive earlier this year.

As he did before in Toccata seconda, in Toccata terza Sorabji looks back to the examples of Bach and Busoni, reinvents them in his own innovative idiom, and expands the concept of the Baroque toccata into a work of monumental proportions. It is a complex, unusual two-hour long composition consisting of ten movements ranging from two short, 3-minute cadenzas to a 50-minute long passacaglia with 102 variations, it is based on the simplest possible material – the three-note motif C-G-F – which is transformed in a myriad ways.

The concert was recorded and later broadcast by the Concertzender radio station. The recording can be listened to here.

There was a second performance in Madrid a few days later. It took place at Hinves PianoLab on 12 July.