Hania Rani's Music Is Tranquil. Please Don't Call It ‘Soothing.'

New York Times

10-04-2025

When the Polish musician Hania Rani released her first solo album, 'Esja,' in 2019, she knew it was a modest debut. Its subtle piano compositions were moody but pared down, and she worried that its serene atmosphere might limit its mainstream appeal.
One year later, the album's placid vibe turned out to be a blessing. As the world locked down against the Covid pandemic, distressed people were turning to streaming playlists with names like 'Calm Vibes' and 'Peaceful Rhythms' that featured Rani's music. It became a breakthrough moment. As one critic told BBC radio during lockdown, Rani's music 'makes your problems and woes all sort of vanish.'
But now, Rani, 34, has become a shooting star in a genre of pop-inflected minimalist music often referred to as neoclassical, or alt-classical — though she bristles at the notion that her music is meant to offer therapy. 'It's not being composed to help people relax,' she said in a recent interview. 'The music might be slow — not so loud, not upbeat — but it's actually intense.'
Her critically lauded follow-up solo albums — 'Home' (2020) and 'Ghosts' (2023) — have made her one of the biggest names in neoclassical music. Rani has won seven Fryderyk Awards, Poland's equivalent to the Grammys, and prompted comparisons to other big-name contemporary composers, such as Nils Frahm and Max Richter.
Her live shows have also drawn online attention, including a 2022 performance in Paris that has garnered nine million views on YouTube. In recent months, she has embarked on a largely sold-out tour through some of the world's best-known concert halls, including the Sydney Opera House and the Berlin Philharmonie.
In the interview in Warsaw between stops on her tour, Rani spoke eloquently and warmly in a rat-a-tat cadence about what she saw as the power of instrumental music. 'On a philosophical, or even spiritual, level, it is exploring what life is, and very basic philosophical questions,' she said. 'It allows people to meet within this music, allowing us to see each other as equals.'
Especially in a period of social division, she said, wordless music allowed groups to share an experience beyond politics or belief. 'I don't know if there are going to be Trump voters, or not, in my audience,' she said. 'But they are all my listeners, and are moved by the same energy.'
That vibe, she emphasized, was far from calm in live performances. During a show in March at the Berlin Philharmonie, in which she played 'Ghosts' accompanied by an electric guitar and a string section, among other instruments, Rani nimbly moved between synthesizers, a drum machine, an upright piano and a grand piano, often banging her head to the beat. At some points, she seemed visibly out of breath.
That may be because her pieces are often 'just really, really hard to play,' said Bergur Thorisson, a frequent Björk collaborator who worked with Rani on 'Esja.' In a video interview from Reykjavik, he said Rani's compositions were 'at a higher level technically' than most of her contemporaries.'
Rani enrolled in a music school at age 7 in Gdansk, Poland, a seaside city known for its jazz scene and for the birth of the Solidarity movement that ushered in democracy to the country. Her parents — a doctor and an architect — 'were not planning on making me into a famous pianist,' she said. 'My mom picked the piano for me because she played the violin and hated it.'
During a stint studying music in Berlin, she gave up her ambitions to become a classical concert pianist — 'Thank God,' she said — in favor of composing. Her plans, she added, were moderated by the fact that she knew of hardly any female contemporary composers to model a career on.
'I thought that meant women cannot be composers,' she said.
Since her 2019 album debut, she has been almost cartoonishly prolific. In addition to her three solo albums, she has released a live recording, two albums with the cellist Dobrawa Czocher, and collaborations with Portico Quartet and the American saxophonist Colin Stetson, as well as several film and television soundtracks.
The Norwegian director Joachim Trier said that he had hired Rani to compose the score for his upcoming movie 'Sentimental Value' — a follow-up to his Oscar-nominated 2021 film 'The Worst Person in the World' — because of her 'sensitivity to vulnerability.' The film, which will premiere at the Cannes film festival in May, focuses on family relationships and required a 'complex approach' that eschewed sentimentality by adding 'levity' to moments that were 'quite sad or quite dark,' Trier said.
'She understands that music shouldn't clutter the expression of a movie, but open it up,' he said. Trier added that Rani was something of a perfectionist about her recordings and had traveled to the villa in Oslo where much of the film is set to experience its acoustics firsthand. 'She's the James Bond of beautiful music right now,' he said.
In a sign of her expanding ambitions, Rani said that she had been consciously moving away from the kind of pared-down neoclassical music that began her career. Her next major project — a concerto partly based on music written by Josima Feldschuh, a Jewish girl who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland before dying of tuberculosis — will be her most explicitly political work.
Rani has already recorded the concerto, called 'Non Fiction' with a 45-person ensemble at Abbey Road Studios in London, and she will give a first live performance at the city's Barbican concert hall in November. She said the piece was informed by the work of Angela Davis, a Marxist academic; and Adania Shibli, a Palestinian writer, adding that it drew connections between Feldschuh and the victims of current conflicts, including in Ukraine and Gaza.
'She was a prodigy kid, who probably thought the war was a temporary event,' Rani said. The concerto, she added, translated the sounds of conflict, like flying rockets and gunshots, into music. 'War is always happening in the background,' Rani said, but 'hearing it makes it much more visceral.'
She added that she hoped the piece would show the capacity of instrumental music to transmit big ideas. 'Music is almost something like a political movement,' Rani said.
'You're gathering people who are different, live in such atomized worlds,' she added, inviting them to 'be part of a community, with different backgrounds. This is not only fascinating, it is important.'