Hania Rani: Non Fiction (with Knoxville Symphony Orchestra)

During the last decade, Polish pianist and composer Hania Rani has emerged as the rarest sort of crossover classical star: Her music revels in technical sophistication and nuance, but it remains wildly accessible, too, flickering like a candlelight on a cold night. Raised in Gdansk, Poland, Rani began playing piano at seven years old and even studied it in Berlin, briefly aspiring to be a concert pianist. But her first two albums as a composer, Esja and Home, found unexpectedly wide audiences amid the pandemic, their senses of romance, emotional intensity, and hushed melodic wonder soothing frayed nerves. The complexity of her music has only grown, incorporating daring jazz structures and imaginative electronic textures. Rani’s acclaimed 2023 album, Ghosts, even brims with bits of soul, her uncanny sense of hook rising like a beacon above her dazzling neoclassical pieces.

In May 2025, after a global sold-out tour of Ghosts and an absorbing live album, Rani set that work aside with two finales featuring new arrangements. In November, for two nights at London’s Barbican, she will premiere Non Fiction, a four-movement piano concerto supported by a 45-piece orchestra. It is based on the work of Josima Feldschuh, a prolific Polish teenager killed during the Holocaust but whose work continues to be performed worldwide. “War is always happening in the background,” Rani told The New York Times of her intention to link that tragedy to contemporary ones. “Hearing it makes it much more visceral.” Big Ears marks Non Fiction’s North American premiere.