Hania Rani & Ensemble

BILD & TEXT: Landstreicher Konzerte

This 'Ensemble' tour is an attempt to fulfil an idea that has been in my head for a long time - performing live the complete album “Ghosts” with a specially expanded ensemble, in some of my favourite venues in Europe. 

Living in an atomized world and observing how our attention span is being stressed to the bare minimum, I see in live performance a rare chance to reconnect with our ability to experience things conveyed with a bigger gesture and stretched time. Releasing a 70 minute long double album in 2023 was a deliberate artistic decision, made in direct contradiction to a common tendency of adjusting art form to a reality shaped by mass media. To me at least, snappy phrases and condensed music compositions which are ideally squeezed into two minutes are rather a brutal and bland expression of the complex and exciting world we are living in and the life we want to spend. 

In March and April 2025, I am making this romantic concept come to life, by bringing the project to the most prestigious and acoustically thrilling venues in Europe. 'Ghosts' will be arranged for a large ensemble, including strings, woodwinds and brass instruments, that will join me on stage during all planned performances. Accompanied by a new light and set design (Stuart Bailes), we will try to manifest the intricate nature of the album, woven from hundreds of sounds, flavours and stories. Differently to what I am used to, appearing mostly alone on stage surrounded by a vast amount of keyboards, this time I am a part of a bigger entity: interacting with nine other musicians, most of them long-time collaborators and friends (cellist Dobrawa Czocher, bassist Ziemowit Klimek) coming from versatile music backgrounds. Together we will be able to present the complete record, whose orchestral and tangled nature wouldn't allow me to perform it on my own in the shape that it deserves. I am absolutely thrilled to explore it with both acoustic and digital sounds, mixing seemingly separate worlds that form my musical style and artistic trajectory. 

What utterly interests me is how one thing can be distributed through endless translations - losing its initial shape but at the same time morphing into something new through different perspectives and environments. Both personal and common can beautifully exist together. Through the multiple voices of brilliant minds and talents, both on the stage and taking care of the visual and technical side of the show, I will try to confront the 'Ghosts' - an essence of what fascinates, moves but also scares us. Embrace the undefined shape of the unspoken and convey it by polymorphic interpretations. 

I also consider this tour as a summing up of my expansive touring in 2023 and 2024 and a last luminous chunk before my well earned dimmed period of quietness. I find it utterly inspiring and moving to finish this exciting ghostly adventure in such a profound and expansive way - celebrating it with a special set of people and my dear listeners.