Sonata for 7 Cities: Live in Vienna [World Premiere Recording]

Sonata for 7 Cities captures pianist Filippo Gorini live at the Mozartsaal of the Wiener Konzerthaus (26 February 2025), the central event of his month-long Vienna residency. The program forms a poetic arc through fragility, transcendence, and spiritual culmination, uniting Schubert, a world premiere by Stefano Gervasoni, and Beethoven’s final sonata.

The recital opens with Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 15 in C major, D840, the unfinished “Reliquie.” A work of symphonic ambition yet intimate lyricism, it moves from introspective stillness in the Moderato to tender song in the Andante. The Menuetto—completed with a brief bridge and coda by Gervasoni—retains dance-like elegance, while the incomplete Rondo radiates playful festivity.

At the centre stands Gervasoni’s Sonata (World Premiere Recording), commissioned by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and Festival Milano Musica. Cast in a single expansive movement, it unfolds as a narrative arc of echoes, lyric outpourings, eruption, and final desolation—an expressive modern counterpoint to the surrounding masterpieces.

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op.111 concludes the journey. The Maestoso–Allegro con brio erupts with urgent drama after its dissonant introduction. The Arietta variations rise from simplicity toward near-ecstatic transcendence, dissolving into contemplative infinity.

Recorded live, the album captures both the intensity of performance and the wider human context of Gorini’s Vienna residency, which included outreach concerts in schools, hospitals, refugee communities, and social institutions—an embodiment of music as shared experience.

Filippo Gorini, Piano