In the morning of 25 September 2019 I received an e-mail from Alistair Hinton, curator of the Sorabji Archive, asking if I would be interested in performing Toccata terza. This proposition was extremely intriguing. The autograph of this unpublished composition from 1955 had been missing since the early sixties. The score had been gifted by Sorabji to the dedicatee, American critic Clinton Gray-Fisk, together with several earlier manuscripts, all of which went missing after Gray-Fisk’s death and were generally believed to have been lost and possibly destroyed. Some of these manuscripts, such as Piano Sonata ‘no. 0’ and Toccatinetta sopra C.G.F., surfaced decades later; however, the whereabouts of Toccata terza remained unknown and it was considered to be a lost work until it was unexpectedly discovered in a private collection.

I have just completed a critical edition of this work. One of the most ambitious piano compositions of the 1950’s, it consists of 10 movements (including a passacaglia with 102 variations), 127 pages, approximately 63500 notes and is estimated to be about two hours long. The score, like all other works by Sorabji, has been published by the Sorabji Archive.