Hauschka

Although partially responsible for some of the dullest dirges around (thanks, Coldplay; thanks, Keane), the piano is nevertheless one of the world’s greatest musical instruments. Played well, either in a classical composition or within the structure of modern music, with a few simple notes it can evoke (and invoke) heartbreak, cynicism, beauty, destruction, malevolence, excitement, happiness, sadness – and can flit between these (and other) moods smoothly and effortlessly, without losing any of their impact. It is, perhaps, inherently more attune to the human heart than any other instrument, as emotionally effective with one spontaneously well-pressed spine-tingling key as it is with a complex structure of chords and two handed patterns.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be enough for Hauschka, the stage name of German-born composer and pianist Volker Bertelmann. Both his recorded albums and his live (mostly improvisational) output revolve around the essence of the piano as an instrument in addition to the melodies and tunes it traditionally produces. Tonight’s show – at the impressively swanky King’s Place – essentially sees Volker fuck with the preconceived notion of what a piano does, much like Henry Cowell and John Cage before him. So an eager and attentive audience sees beaded necklaces strung across the instrument’s strings, pieces of tape and paper inserted between them, a small, plastic wind-up duck working his way across the keys, magnets thrown into the open lid – all distorting and enhancing the music that Bertelmann is making, turning the piano into some kind of mechanised, mutated machine. Yet this mutant piano however retains its inherent beauty is reinvented and transformed into something else entirely.

Bertelmann is joined for most of his performance by a violist and a cellist, and the three of them together create a series of compositions that are truly remarkable, as much for how they’re made as how they sound. The beauty – and also the tragedy – of it all, is that what’s played tonight may never again be heard or performed, and will almost certainly never be written down or committed to tape. Truly ephemeral, tonight’s music was created for a particular moment in time. It inhabited that moment perfectly and fully, but as soon as bows are taken and the piano closed, it ceases to exist except as some distant, stirring dream, like the half-remembered face of the first person you truly loved.