Sonata for 7 Cities: Live in Hong Kong

Sonata for 7 Cities is Filippo Gorini’s yearlong project of month-long residencies in seven cities, and this live album comes from the Hong Kong leg. During a month there, as the guest of Premiere Performances Hong Kong (October 23 to November 25, 2025), he combined concerts, teaching and outreach. He played for homeless shelters, a blind community and underprivileged children, as well as for conventional audiences. The centerpiece was this City Hall recital, which Gorini describes as a journey “from pure adrenaline to sublime poetry,” linked by a hidden thread of repeated notes.

The program opens with the premiere of Beat Furrer’s Studie IV für Klaviersolo, a nervy tour de force of chromatic clusters and erratic rhythms that collapses into mysterious quiet. Brahms’s late Fantasien, Op. 116 follows, alternating eruptive capriccios with fragile intermezzos in an autumnal, retrospective mood. After the break comes Schubert’s Sonata in G major, D. 894, the “divinely long” piece Schumann admired, warm and introspective and ending in quiet peace. Recorded live at Hong Kong City Hall, the album captures the particular energy of a recital given in the middle of an extraordinary month.

Filippo Gorini, piano