Towards the Beloved City

For centuries, Paris has been a place where those in search of themselves have arrived only to realise they were always on the way. Writers, poets, composers, and filmmakers have wandered its boulevards and left behind echoes of their longing: Hemingway called it “a moveable feast”, an experience that never leaves you. 

“I believe each of us has a Beloved City. It may have no coordinates and might exist only in our imagination. But all of us are longing for that place: where we are loved, where someone knows our name, where we no longer need to pack our suitcase, and where we finally feel good enough.” 

‘Towards the Beloved City’ is not just an album, it’s a map of emotional survival. The cycle of piano waltzes by composer and pianist Kirill Richter is dedicated to those who have loved someone they couldn’t reach, who stayed in relationships that dimmed their light, who walked away not because they stopped loving, but because they finally started loving themselves. 

These pieces carry the quiet ache of missed connections, the beauty of small joys, the weight of walking forward with a broken heart, and the hope that there is still a place for you in this world where you are seen, chosen, and safe. "When I composed this music, I just wanted to tell these stories so that people would feel less alone, that this music could hold them in their most fragile moments." 

Each waltz becomes the heartbeat of a little cinematic story: poetic, fragmented, intimate like the pages of an unfinished novel or the lost reels of a Nouvelle Vague film. They carry echoes of longing, reflections of tenderness, glimpses of hope. This music is for that journey. For the courage to keep walking. For the moments when your loneliness becomes your dance partner. And somehow, you learn to move together.