Hania Rani
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
The week before Halloween is the perfect moment for Hania Rani to conjure an evening of mystery and shadow-play. Giving her largest Irish concert so far, the classically trained Polish pianist and composer is here to re-create, in light and shade, her haunting new album, Ghosts – a reflection on “life and death ... real and unreal”.
She starts this extraordinary show bathed in chocolatey gloom, the stage framed by still lighting. A grand piano stands before a bank of complicated-looking analogue equipment, the sort of kit men in white coats manipulate in old films about mainframe computers.
Rani wears a black top and track pants, paired, idiosyncratically, with chunky sneakers. When facing the wall of wires, she turns semi-invisible. In the dark, she is a ghost at her own gig.
That phantasmagorical sensibility is a recurring note through a mesmerising set that opens with the tentative chill of Oltre Terra and leads into 24.03, the latter suggesting Jean-Michel Jarre jamming with Philip Glass. It is a stunning feat of musical meditation, a sonic seance that sweeps the audience far from Dublin to a twilight realm dredged from the spookiest recesses of Rani’s imagination.
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Nobody will mistake her for Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift. But she can write a “hit” when the fancy takes, as demonstrated by Hello, where she achieves a sort of spectral jauntiness by repeating the title over and over. It’s funny, sweet, hypnotic and a bit scary.
In the English-speaking world, Rani – real name Hanna Raniszewska – remains under the radar. On the Continent, however, she is a star in the making, her audience having grown exponentially during lockdown. The catalyst was a stream of her performance Live from Studio S2, which has clocked up more than six million views (and prompted the BBC presenter Mark Coles to herald her “sublime and minimalist” playing).
A third component of her music is jazz. She is signed to Gondwana Records, the Manchester-based label run by the jazz trumpeter Matthew Halsall (who plays Cork Jazz Festival this weekend), while Ghosts features a cameo from the London “ambient bebop” ensemble Portico Quartet. At Vicar Street, the jazz influences come through a stand-up bassist, who brings a frisky solemnity.
Rani doesn’t speak much on Tuesday evening. But when she does she displays a brisk humour. At one point she asks if the dry ice at one side of the stage is a sign that Halloween has arrived early. Later, she wonders if there’s a dog in the audience. It wouldn’t be the first time. Playing Budapest last year, she was surprised to see a classical-loving canine in the front row. The pooch went on to tag her on Instagram – a sure sign Rani is going places.
She finishes with an old track, the magisterial Leaving. It’s a showcase for her expressive voice – and for writing that is full of poise yet, just under the surface, trembles with passion and wonder.
