Festival review: Hania Rani
From techno dreamscapes to heavy electronica, Hania Rani is unique among keyboard artists for the multiplicity of skills she possesses.
Ten years ago, a young Polish pianist made a splash by recording classically-inspired rock covers with a cellist friend from her music school in Gdansk. That album, Biała flaga, launched a break-out career that has seen few equals. Now with four solo albums behind her, Hania Rani (born Hanna Maria Raniszewska) has forged a musical language all of her own and is admired by thousands of followers.
Her work bridges electronic, house and ambient while still being classical at its core. If that sounds a bit implausible, it is probably because there aren’t many artists with her sort of background, and certainly even fewer with her breadth of talent. Having studied electronic music along with jazz in Berlin, where she lived for many years, she is all over the technology side of things when it comes to synths, sequencers and such like.
To see her gliding between piano and synthesiser, twiddling knobs and adjusting faders in one continuous flow is quite a thing. Head bowed low over the keys and body gently pulsing to the music make Rani look every bit the stage performer. At times she seemingly falls into a trance, oblivious of the audience.
Technology does a disappearing trick when she plays, because it really is the driven artist that one witnesses. Her improvisational prowess, songwriting ability and sensitivity to sound are very captivating — her audience surrenders to a new form of sonic beauty.
Rani’s Adelaide appearance, the final stop in her Australian tour before she heads back to Warsaw, took place at a very fully attended Adelaide Entertainment Centre — a venue that is reasonable for its sound system but totally unlovable for its dreary interior, and a far cry from other more salubrious places that this musician has performed in, such as the royal courtyard of the Invalides, Paris, in 2022 (one of her most celebrated recorded concerts).
The Adelaide Festival audience was treated to some of her most adventurous work plus a few surprises in this two-hour crescendo of a show.
A quiet dreamscape began with ‘Fall’, her rework of a track by Icelandic duo Hugar. An ode to all things lost, Rani laced her wispy vocals with a beguiling tapestry of electronic sounds. Then came the synth-only ‘Oltre Terra’ from her third album, Ghosts (2023), and a clutch of pieces that also feature on her live album, Nostalgia (2024): the moody, pulse-driven ‘24.03’, the haunting ‘Dancing with Ghosts’, and one of her most beautiful songs, ‘The Boat’. Its gently rocking chords are infinitely calming.
Rani’s compositions can sound drifty, but they are actually precisely put together. With its hypnotic harmonies and long melodic spans, ‘Komeda’ was a good example of how she appears to let her musicianship run free but in fact ties everything together with the keenest of ears and a flawless sense of pulse.
With its poor sightlines and lack of atmosphere, the Entertainment Centre robbed this concert of much needed intimacy. Nevertheless, projections behind her helped add visual interest: misty moonlit lighting, flickering drawings, and amoeba-like crawling shapes synchronised well with each piece.
One eye-opener was to see no collaborating musicians on stage. Rani is known for collecting a family of musos around her, and some outstanding ones at that, including Patrick Watson and Olafur Arnalds in Ghosts. But here she was alone with her self-invented art, and actually all the more impressive for going completely solo.
The other surprise was to hear her open out quite prodigiously in her singing. In the past, Rani’s light but attractive voice has been a rather incidental layer to her material. But especially in ‘Leaving’ and ‘Don’t Break My Heart’, she showed she is capable of much so more now. Breathy in tone, she swings pitch-wise through words almost like Kate Bush.
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Heavy electronica dominated toward the end in the pumped-up ‘Tin Line’ and ‘Always in the Dark’. In both these, she opened up her vocal cords prodigiously. One sensed she may have been over-compensating for her absent muso friends. But one thing was clear: Rani possesses vocal chops that perhaps she didn’t even believe she has.
It seems that this young artist’s talents just keep multiplying.
Hania Rani appeared at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre on 1 March
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview