It was a tremendous experience performing Sorabji’s Toccata terza again in Madrid. The concert took place on 21 January 2024 in the wonderful acoustics and immersive environment of the Sala Negra, Teatros del Canal, where I played the complete work for the third time.

A complex, two-hour composition consisting of ten movements ranging from two short, 3-minute cadenzas to a 50-minute long passacaglia with 102 variations, Toccata terza (1955) it is based on the simplest possible material – the three-note motif C-G-F – which is transformed in a myriad ways. Another interesting feature of the work is its history – the manuscript and only copy of the work was lost for almost sixty years until, very unexpectedly, it was found in 2019. The score (both the manuscript and my critical edition of it) can be obtained from the Sorabji Archive.

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.

On 30 November 2022 I presented the project “ALEKSANDR SKRIABIN: 150 YEARS”, the result of a collaboration with several composers of the Madrid area as a tribute to Scriabin in the 150th anniversary of his birth. This fascinating programme consisted of works either directly inspired by Scriabin’s music or connected to some of the composer’s central ideas such as synesthesia and the union of the arts. This concert was part of the Madrid International Contemporary Music Festival (COMA’22) and took place at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música (Madrid).

I feel fortunate and honoured that I had the opportunity to collaborate with such wonderful composers as Pedro Gómez, Beatriz Arzamendi, Alicia Díaz de la Fuente, Eduardo Pérez Maseda and Luis Navarro, who contributed works for piano with or without electronics. I am also very grateful to COMA festival for hosting this concert.

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 The autograph of this unpublished composition from 1955 had been missing since the early sixties.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.

In my first post-lockdown concert I performed Sorabji’s ‘Toccata seconda’ at the Willem Twee toonzaal (’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands) on Sunday, 4th October, beginning at 11:00 AM. (Approximate duration 145 minutes plus an interval).

It was a memorable experience performing this glorious work again. So many thanks to Bart de Graaf and Gijs van der Meijden for all their efforts in making this concert possible, and to the audience for their kindness and enthusiasm.

The city of ’s-Hertogenbosch is famous, among other things, for being the birthplace of Renaissance artist Hyeronimus Bosch. If you take a look at the Toccata seconda CD cover, you will realise how marvellous a coincidence this is (or is it not?).

The concert was recorded and broadcast by the Concertzender radio station (listen).