My first album, a double CD with the world premiere recording of the work Toccata seconda per pianoforte by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988) is being released this month by Piano Classics. This is one of the most beautiful, accessible works by this enigmatic composer and a perfect introduction to his music. More info at the Piano Classics website here.

Sorabji was a remarkably original, extremely prolific composer. He devoted most of his relatively uneventful life to the creation of an extraordinary set of works, among which are some of the longest, most complex, most exhuberant compositions ever written for the piano. Most of his music remained almost unknown until its rediscovery in recent decades. In his compositions Sorabji combines a very personal approach to the Western classical musical tradition with elements related to Eastern music (abundance of detail, rhythmic intricacy, melodic freedom); unheard-of challenges for the performer with sonorities of extreme delicacy.

There will be another performance of Sorabji’s Toccata seconda per pianoforte next month in Madrid:

14 March 2019, 11:30 am
Auditorium, Conservatorio “Teresa Berganza”
C/ Palmípedo, 3 (Madrid)

In 2019 I will be performing the work Toccata seconda per pianoforte by Kaikhosru Sorabji (1892-1988), an English composer of Indian ancestry who wrote some of the longest, most complex – and certainly most fascinating – works in the piano repertoire. Toccata seconda (1934) is a two-and-a-half-hour-long work that has been performed in concert only twice before – the first time by Sorabji himself – and is therefore a true rarity of piano literature.

I will play this work for the first time in Spain in Sala Eutherpe (León) on January 12, 2019, starting at 8.00 pm (not at 7.00 pm!). More information here (in Spanish only). (more…)