On December 3, Hania Rani filled the Chan Centre stage with pianos.
To Rani’s left was an upright piano, which she used for understated and serene motifs. In front of her was a modern keyboard stacked below a synthesizer — an instrument that looks like a keyboard, but emits sweeping electronic rumbles instead of a piano’s gentle plinks. To her right sat a grand piano, which made room for subtle variations in pressure during tender or dynamic passages.
She adopts this exact configuration wherever she works in a studio, and on each stage, completing her elaborate setup with electronic instruments and boards that sit on top of each piano. In Europe, she told me post-concert, they usually drive her pianos around the continent when she’s touring. That hadn’t been practical for Rani’s first North American tour.
“But today, we were lucky,” she said. “We were able to use the exact same pianos as the ones I use at home.”
It’s clear that for her, the setup itself is a home, of sorts. Back facing the audience, she receded immediately into deep focus on the stage — the audience was just there to see her work in her natural environment.
Rani’s first piece began with a few delicate foundation layers, as she looped tracks live to create elaborate symphonic tapestries across her various instruments. “It’s like painting with different brushes,” she said. And she was liberal with the paint; soon, the concert hall was booming with layers of hypnotic instrumentation.
Her only companion on stage was bassist Ziemowit Klimek, who performed triple duty on the double bass, a MIDI controller and yet another piano keyboard. As the duo leapt across their spaces, their synchronized movements alone were a work of performance art. There was a sense of urgency, even in their softest moments. Rani and Klimek needed to keep up to the flow of the music, or their melodic line would fall out of rhythm with the countless other tracks they’d already laid down.
The result was an exacting perfection that, magically, still managed to sound organic and improvised. Like ocean waves, Rani’s music can be deeply predictable on a moment-to-moment level — swell, crest, ripple, retreat. The melodies are steady, often containing permutations of just one or two musical themes per piece. But humans have never been able to digitally simulate an ocean wave in perfect fidelity. In a similar way, the tenor in Rani’s playing holds ineffable variety.
Her work is deeply grounded in her interactions with nature. Rani’s debut solo album, Esja, was named after a mountain in Iceland of the same name. The piece “Sun” was “inspired by the sun, but also by feeling small in the universe.” Though she’s centred her following albums around different themes, her 2023 album Ghosts features a piece called “Oltre Terra” — an Italian term for transhumance, the nomadic practice of moving to a different piece of land with one’s livestock at each season.
For Rani, music is always there, waiting to be extracted from her surroundings. During the recording process for her debut album, she recounted in an album preface, she played a new melody and was asked where it had come from. “It came today,” she replied, simply. The piece appears on Esja, titled “Today It Came.”
That steady flow of inspiration has made her an especially prolific musician. In the four years since Rani’s 2019 debut, she’s released three LPs, and another 11 albums through collaborations and film soundtracks.
She can only compose when she’s not performing or travelling, which cuts her writing time to just a few months per year. And yet, all of her work seems deeply intentional and intricate. Watching her deftly manipulate her collection of pianos and electronic dashboards without any sheet music or visual cues made it seem like she had known these pieces her whole life.
Rani’s background as a classical pianist endows her with an eye for shaping a coherent flow of quiet and thundering moments. Her hands are deft and powerful, forming crisp, delineated staccatos. In a live event, her awareness of the audience was even more palpable: the synthesizers soared, then slipped away, deftly manipulating the energy in the room.
Sometimes, grasping at specificity to anchor the pieces’ emotional arcs, Rani attaches lyrics to her songs. During her set, she looped lyrics as echoes across a canyon: “I’m waiting for nothing, waiting alone / Hello (hello), hello (hello), hello.” Rani dipped in and out of wordlessness, trying to decide the medium that would best suit her message.
In a quiet interlude, she approached her grand piano. There was a hoarseness to her playing as Klimek’s bass retreated. She sank into a solo performance of “Dreamy” from her 2023 film soundtrack, On Giacometti. The hall became a room of hushed meditation.
And then, in a blink, it was over. The room woke up from its trance. Klimek re-emerged. As the applause died down, she sang an encore from her 2020 album Home, leaning her head toward the microphone again.
“Are you leaving? (Are you leaving?) / Are you leaving? (Are you leaving?)” she asked. “Is there a better place?”
Then, a pause: “I guess / the doors are open, remember to take care.”