Music for Film and Theatre

Polish pianist and composer Hania Rani completes her triptych for Manchester’s Gondwana Records with Music for Film and Theatre, the third in a line that runs from 2019’s Esja through last year’s Home. It is not a new body of work so much as a curation: Rani describes the record as her “drawer of precious objects”, gathering the scores she has written for Polish film and theatre over the past decade, several of which have never been released before.

The twelve tracks trace an itinerant career across cinema and stage. The documentary xAbo: Father Boniecki supplies three pieces, the 2020 film I Never Cry contributes four brief, evocative sketches, and the stage production Pradziady lends the ghostly Ghosts. Fragments of incidental music such as At the Hospital, over in barely a minute, sit beside fully-formed compositions like the closing Nora, giving the record the shape of a working composer’s notebook rather than a polished studio set.

What binds the collection together is Rani’s distinctive hybrid of classical piano and ambient electronica. Her pianos are recorded up close, every hammer and felt creak audible, then wrapped in warm reverb and subtle field recordings—birdsong, waves, tape hiss—that give even the shortest pieces an outsized sense of space. It is a sound that owes as much to contemporary ambient and electronica as to the recital hall, and it makes a 107-second sketch feel complete.

The highlights are the longer works. Prayer unfolds over gently shifting chords, its melody allowed to breathe in the reverb, whilst In Between layers a pulsing electronic undertow beneath the piano, recalling the rhythmic side Rani explored on Home. Wildfires, drawn from the documentary Truth in Fire, is the record’s most dramatic moment, building from sparse figures into something close to urgency over five and a half minutes, and Soleil Pâle shows her flair for luminous, slow-building passages. Ghosts lives up to its name, its spare notes hanging in the air like a half-remembered melody.

Curation records often feel like compilations, but Music for Film and Theatre hangs together as a single, coherent statement—a testament to how consistent Rani’s voice has been across commissions and contexts. For newcomers it is an ideal entry point; for those who have followed the arc from Esja onwards, it deepens the picture of an artist who treats every score, however small, as an opportunity for beauty.