Zubin Kanga: Silver Screens / Steel Strings, London, City, University of London, 26 March 2019

Extract

Zubin Kanga has about as wide a range of performance experience as one can get playing recently written art music – his bio mentions collaborations with contemporary warhorses like Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, and Steve Reich – but as a solo performer he has cultivated a distinctive and specialised practice that maps onto the wider action of international New Music in increasingly fascinating ways. For the past few years, his solo tours have showcased an expanded practice which binds the performer to one or another technological apparatus that centrally determines the form and execution of the piece, raising questions of autonomy, authorship and identity. These concerns are reflected in the titles of the tours: ‘Dark Twin’, ‘Cyborg Pianist’ and, currently, ‘Piano Ex Machina’.