Concept
Performance-Recitals
Where the concert hall becomes a gallery.
A Performance-Recital combines live piano with art installations, cinematic lighting, and immersive staging. Created by Katinka von Richter, each event transforms a unique venue into a gallery of sound and light.
A Performance-Recital is neither a concert nor an installation. It is an evening held together by a single idea — a room, a programme, a visual apparatus, and an audience asked to hear listening as something they participate in rather than receive.
The work began in 2019 with a chapel in Saint-Eustache and a cycle of late Schubert played on a prepared grand. It has since moved through industrial halls, empty department stores, and a partially flooded greenhouse in the Ruhr. Each project is made with a different visual artist, a different space, and — always — a different reason.
What they share is a commitment to the idea that a piano is never just a piano. It is a piece of room-sized furniture, a mechanical animal, and a vessel for light. Performance-Recitals try to let all three of those things speak at once.
October 2025
Threshold Nocturne
Halle 14, Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei — Leipzig
Twenty-four nocturnes, one hundred candles, and a partially dismantled upright placed at the far end of a 2,000 square metre former cotton mill. The audience moved on foot through the length of the hall; the sound followed them at a delay. Each nocturne was paired with a single light gesture — a candle extinguished, a curtain drawn, a window opened to the February air — so that by the end of the programme the only illumination in the room was the piano's own dust.
Press
“A listening experience so thoroughly choreographed that by the final Chopin I had forgotten I was standing.”
“Von Richter has built something new: a concert that refuses to sit still.”
May 2024
Atrium Messe
former Karstadt atrium, Hermannplatz — Berlin
Three hundred folding chairs arranged around a single black Steinway in the middle of a decommissioned department store atrium. The programme — Ligeti études, Galina Ustvolskaya's sixth sonata, and a new work by Mika Vainio — unfolded over two hours under the original 1920s skylight. No amplification. No programme notes. Audience members were given a small brass token on arrival and asked to place it on the floor at any moment they felt moved to. By the end of the evening the floor was covered in a constellation of three hundred points of light.
Press
“The most radical pianist working in Europe right now, and somehow also the most hospitable.”
“A format of startling intimacy in a space built for nothing of the kind.”