Piano Concerto is a close-to-silent homage to the piano concerto genre – a work based on clichés in a very quiet universe. Christian Winther Christensen often relates to music history through quotations and intimations and in Piano Concerto the piano functions both as a percussion instrument and as a narrative monster from the past.
When the work was last performed, at Ultraschall Berlin in 2022 a critic stated that “The work undertakes an interesting reformulation of the genre. The listener only hears the electronically amplified sounds of the fingers touching the keys and the muffled tapping of the hammers on the dampened strings. The sound painting is notoriously ironic, airy here, gloomy there, always sparse, always fascinatingly light. The ludicrous repeating patterns of the endless trills of the cadenza have a completely ghostly effect.”
In Winther Christensen's Piano Concerto the piano is already pre-recorded, and the sound of it only comes out when the soloist touches the piano keys without pressing them down. Contact microphones respond to the sound of the pianist’s nails touching the keys, and behind the scenes, a ’ghost pianist’ is playing on a midi keyboard to control the pre-recorded material.
The pianist Rei Nakamura spoke about the work in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur in 2022. Listen here.
Find more information about the concert at Warsaw Autumn here.