Frahm brings classical-electro hybrid to Waterford
The German wunderkind brings his brilliant classical-electro hybrid to All Together Now next weekend, writes
It'searly afternoon in Berlin and piano wunderkind Nils Frahm is getting stuck into a work of mind-bending, horizon- expanding complexity.
“I’m renovating,” he explains. “I have to decide how the bathroom will work out. It’s an interesting task. Like music but with different shapes and forms.”
Is he eager to finish the bathroom design and return to his piano? “At this time of the day I am not the most creative. I try to use my day for different tasks and distribute them.”
Such impeccable logic likewise informs his music. When Frahm (35) played to a packed Dublin National Concert Hall in February, the performance pinged between dance-floor ready electronica and solo pieces of heartswelling intensity.
The idea was to take the audience on an emotional rollercoaster, each switchback and figurative loop-the-loop pulled off with breathtaking precision.
It’s a unique talent – to be equally at home in the world of techno-pop and contemporary music (the fancy term for modern classical).
And it is one that has made Frahm among the most critically acclaimed piano players today, a name to drop is trend-conscious circles.
Frahm has sold out venues across the world and is in demand as a soundtrack composer, with the score to the experimental 2015 German heist movie Victoria (shot in a single take) among his most acclaimed projects .
He also has a vocal cheerleader in Cork actor Cillian Murphy, who narrated an Enda Walsh story for a compilation assembled by Frahm and released under the Late Night Tales banner (the collection juxtaposed Nina Simone and Miles Davis with comparatively obscure electro artists such as Board of Canada and Four Tet).
“He got in touch to say he was a fan,” Frahm recalls. “We ended up meeting and we speak often. He looks for ways to support and offered to do this thing: it was incredible.”
One of the most extraordinary aspects of Frahm’s music — the live shows especially — is the sheer spectrum of genres and emotions.
He returns to Ireland to perform at the first All Together Now festival and attendees can look forward to a set that bounds, with an almost puppyish glee, between the severe and the throwaway, the banging and the introspective. “Context is interesting,” he says.
“I like how a quiet piece feels after you’ve done a very loud one. And how a loud one feels after a quiet one.”
Frahm’s early career saw him flirt with enfant terrible status. One of his earliest teachers, when he was growing up outside Hamburg, was the last living protege of Tchaikovsky. But he found formal classical training limiting.
Regurgitating the past did not have much appeal for an artist with both eyes locked on the future. As soon as he could he left for Berlin, where he found work as a studio technician.
“It is boring to me to stay in just one feeling or to repeat a different type of emotion over and over. I like to surprise myself and then also people. When I’m excited the feeling transmits automatically to an audience.”
But it unsettles him slightly to be thought of a classical wild child. He isn’t waging a war against the
academy — or anyone else for that matter. There is no need to rip down classical music and start over. You won’t find any wrecking balls in his repertoire.
“You don’t have to destroy something in this case to build something new. Sometimes you need to do that. I don’t have the authority or desire to replace anything. I would rather like to add to the list.
"I am a big fan of all genres of music. It is an ongoing discovery for me I don’t want to repeat what has already been done a million times. I would like to build a new house next to all these other construction sites, rather than tear another house down.”
One surprise is how charismatic he can be in concert. At the NCH, he shared a funny story about a bespoke organ he had designed — so huge it ended up gathering dust in his living room until he was finally convinced to bring it on tour.
He appreciates individuality in instruments as much as in people, he says — if everything was perfect, nothing would have a personality.
“That’s why I love analogue instruments. Like me, they are different every time. Sometimes they are in a sweet spot, sometimes they need a bit of service – and all in between. I’m not interested in just repeating somebody else’s idea. I am interested in music as a psychological tool – how it changes when something within me changes.”
