Piano Speakers

Wojtek Blecharz: Concerto for Piano and Wireless Speakers (2021-23, WP)

Rei Nakamura (Piano)
Wojtek Blecharz (“Conductor”)

Wojtek Blecharz’s Concerto for Piano and Wireless Speakers is the first piece by the composer in nearly a decade that was not a commission and therefore it was created without the related time pressures. At the suggestion of pianist Rei Nakamura, who is a guest this year with a workshop at Nicolas Hodges’s Darmstadt Piano Studio and has been commissioning several works for piano and other media for many years, Wojtek Blecharz works on the foil of a genre steeped in tradition (the piano concerto) but performs it in a highly experimental manner, dispensing with an instrumental ensemble or orchestra altogether and replacing it with small mobile speakers. While Rei Nakamura takes on the role of the soloist, the composer acts as a kind of “conductor” by placing the loudspeakers in the room, quite possibly in interaction with the audience. If one associates the industrial revolution with the possibility of mass-producing musical instruments, then the small mobile loudspeakers, for their part, refer to the digital revolution, with which the mass storage of sounds and their reproduction at any place and at any time becomes possible. Wojtek Blecharz – born in Poland in 1981 and winner of the 2012 Darmstadt Summer Course scholarship – was probably also thinking about this when he replaced one “sound body” with the other. Thus, this hybrid setting creates a completely new musical space that desires different listening perspectives.

With the support of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Musikfonds