Hania Rani: Non Fiction
Barbican, London
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

NO STRANGER to ambitious projects, Hania Rani has described her latest — Non Fiction: A Piano Concerto in Four Movements — as the most complex of her career.

If Ghosts, which she toured only six months ago, demonstrated her electro-acoustic wizardry, then Non Fiction is more firmly rooted in the classical tradition.

Five years in development, the work enjoys its world premiere at the Barbican tonight and marks the Polish neo-classical pianist’s first piano concerto.

The piece was commissioned in 2020 by the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw after the discovery of music composed by child prodigy Josima Feldschuh in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she was forced to move with her family in 1940, aged 11. She died from tuberculosis in 1943 after they escaped and went into hiding from the Nazis, who were conducting mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp.

This dark backdrop to Feldschuh’s composition informed Rani’s decision to relate Non Fiction to the horrors of the present day: namely, the genocide in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The 45-strong Manchester Collective orchestra, conducted by Hugh Tieppo-Brunt, is richly arrayed with alto and bass flutes, horns and a harp, clarinets, a bassoon, celesta and a sizeable string section.

Flutes and strings soar like birds, a symbol of freedom and escape, in its breathtakingly beautiful and sombre first movement. At front and centre is Rani, who plays both upright and grand piano placed at right angles to each other, as if to visually reinforce the dualities of the score.

Harmony and noise co-exist, with Rani intending to create “realms” in which the orchestra is divided into either/or groups rather than arranged traditionally by instrument, while the use of controlled aleatorism (sections of music that are left to chance) grants musicians some rhythmic freedom. Thematically, this works in evoking the epic, the haunting, the nightmarish chaos, though at times it may overreach.

Undoubtedly a successor to neo-classical greats in both scope and talent, Rani begins the night with another 40-minute premiere — Shining — inspired by a stream-of-consciousness short story of the same name by Norwegian author Jon Fosse.

Arranged for 12 musicians, the hypnotic composition, with its rich ostinatos, nods to Philip Glass and Steve Reich, both famed for penning works for ensembles of similar size.

Non Fiction: A Piano Concerto In Four Movements is released by Decca records. For more information visit haniarani.com