HIGHLIGHTED RELEASE:
HANIA RANI’s new & superb album ON GIACOMETTI
contemporary classical / instrumental / soundtrack
HANIA RANI is a Polish pianist, composer and singer who lives in Warsaw and Berlin.
Her debut album BIAŁA FLAGA, which she has recorded with Polish cellist Dobrawa Czocher, was released in 2015. Two years later she formed the duo TĘSKNO with singer Joanna Longić, with whom she released the album MI in 2018. Thanks to a video recording in Studio S2 of Polish radio 2021, which was viewed millions of times on Youtube, she gained worldwide attention. In 2019 she released her first solo album ESJA on Gondwana Records.
Her new album ON GIACOMETTI has been out for almost a month and on KAE’s list of albums to be absolutely recommended and highligthed, as it is -in my humble opinion- the kind of music urgently needed in times such as these.
May “beautiful” -especially in the field of fine arts- be an inflationary term, here it is undeniably applicable and irreplaceable, if one wishes to describe Hania Rani’s latest work with words. Other adjectives coming to mind are: poetic, gentle, soothing, sublime.
‘On Giacometti’ is the soundtrack for ‘I Giacometti’ – a documentary about the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti and his family. When Susanna Fanzun, the director of the documentary, asked Hania Rani to write the score, she did not think twice and secluded herself to the Swiss mountains to work – to a place only minutes away from Giacometti’s birthplace.
It is most likely due to these two factors -the solitude in the Swiss mountains and the simultaneous proximity to Giacometti’s origins- that the soundtrack has such a strong connection to the sculptor’s work – its existentialism, its minimalism, its honesty. It stands out amongst countless similar piano albums and transports the environment in which it was initiated and implemented to the listener.
On the role of the environment in her composing, Hania Rani says: “This soundtrack would probably be a very different thing if composed in a place that I am usually living in[…] The space is usually the key element that gives me the answer about the arrangement or character of the project”. But even without the reference to Giacometti or the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland in winter and the melting streams in spring, the album is a beautiful journey through which one is carried gently as if on wings.
The album release contains a selection and only excerpts of the soundtrack – the full compositions can be heard in the documentary only.
Hania Rani can be seen live very soon:
March, 26th – Antwerp (BE)
March, 27th – Amsterdam (NL)
March, 29th – Munich (DE)
March, 30th – Zurich (CH)
March, 31st – Milan (IT)
April, 1st – Freiburg (DE)
April, 2nd – Paris (FR)
More dates can be found here.
HANIA RANI’s LINKS:
WEBSITE
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
BANDCAMP
SPOTIFY
