#the2022recital is now out on streaming platforms everywhere!

#the2022recital is Filip’s first solo album consisting of his solo piano works written in 2021-2022. Exploring various influences from classical music to jazz and folk in his works, this collection is the result of Filip’s love for Mozart as much as the singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. In true post-covid fashion, this album was recorded in his living room.

About the project
When Covid-19 hit the UK in March 2020, I was just finishing the last year of my composition studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Unaware of what the upcoming months were about to bring, I’d paused making music for what I thought would be just a few days or weeks at most. When I’d realized all of the performances for the rest of the year were getting cancelled and nobody knew when live performances would be back, I stopped creating altogether. Empty concert halls aren’t particularly inspiring. It was only months later that I was able to start writing again. The ideas wouldn’t come to me easily, however, and everything seemed unnatural and pointless. To stimulate my creative juices, I’d started writing pieces in various styles that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered at all. The result is #the2022recital – a collection of piano pieces that are not taking themselves too seriously but strive to challenge both the performer and the audience to be listening, curious and playful.

About the works
Sonata is the first of these pieces. In three contrasting movements, this composition explores the influences of jazz and pop music as well as that of French baroque composers such as Couperin and Rameau. The overall structure owes a lot to Mozart’s piano sonatas on which I’ve learned everything I know about playing the piano. Popular music styles and various historical eras were not my only inspiration; like many composers in the past, I’d turned to folk music to embrace my musical roots, Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair being a semi-improvised arrangement of the tune that I’ve loved for as long as I can remember. The idea for Fairytale came to me after observing Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit depicting a Sicilian Painter Mario Minniti who is said to be the artist’s close friend and perhaps a lover. Albeit rather fast, this piece is essentially a love song musically influenced by renaissance lute songs in its slower parts. RKN is a romance I wrote in December 2021. Similarly, A Sausage Roll in Tollesbury is another of the diary-like items in this program that commemorates a particularly beautiful morning in English village Tollesbury. Street Preludes represent the urban influences in my music. They were written recently as a part of my YouTube series A Prelude a Day and they mostly take inspiration in playing of Laura Nyro and Billy Joel combined with various classical forms. Finally, Still Love is a short piece about my love for piano that seems to evolve in unexpected, often quiet ways.