Hannah Peel @ ELBPHILHARMONIE

Choirs murmur through large reverberation chambers, strings join in with a soft woodiness, electronic beats add contrast. Hannah Peel succeeds effortlessly in combining the most diverse worlds of sound. Her tracks are highly complex on the one hand and yet as catchy as any pop song. It also seems so playful and brimming over with energy – perhaps a result of Hannah Peel’s childhood in Yorkshire, where her father used to take her along to folk sessions. She went on to enter the academic world of music, studying violin, trombone and piano at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. »I love your music!«, the school’s founder Paul McCartney whispers into her ear after a premiere.

It did not take long for her great talent as an arranger and composer to become apparent. She has been writing string and wind parts for Paul Weller for years and, along with Charles Hazlewood, she is reinventing the orchestra as an integration project called »Paraorchestra«. She also writes celebrated film scores, including for the documentary »Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch«, nominated for an Emmy. Hannah Peel’s solo works deal with such wide-ranging themes as dementia (»Awake But Always Dreaming«), Irish folk (»The Broken Wave«) and neuroscience (»Fir Wave«), yet they are always approachable and tangible thanks to her sense of sound.