Martin Kohlstedt

The conflict is written all over Martin Kohlstedt’s face. It doesn’t matter whether the composer and pianist connects with the audience for a moment or sinks back into his refuge of steel-string keyboards and synthesizers. His gaze searches relentlessly, feels its way through some space, and is thus usually a heart-wrenching moment ahead of his mind. As a musician, this is a risk, a provoked and provocative game on the edge of his own control—as a composer, however, it makes sense. For the energy and unpredictability of his concerts, Kohlstedt—an unmistakably Thuringian lad—is quite notorious, and this has taken him from the Russian State Library to the Iranian Talar-e Rudaki and all the way to the sold-out main hall of Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Yet in all this, one finds no pretense of grand spectacle, only a different way of conceiving music and communicating through it: There are no “works” per se, but rather compositional modules whose power lies in the potential of their combinability and variations. These modules, as Kohlstedt calls them, produce unpredictable punchlines and conflicts precisely through their interconnection.
This applies not only to his concerts. Even on the companion albums “Tag” and “Nacht” (2012 / 2014), the format-driven recording feels like a necessary evil to capture one of its manifestations. One voyeuristically witnesses an encounter between Kohlstedt and his home piano. With “Strom” (2017), the templates of the stage persona and his instrument finally dissolve in an intoxicating whirlwind of piano melodies and electronic landscapes. There is no longer any discernible boundary between new and old or between analog and digital instrumentation. Sound and structure take a back seat to the desire to simply let moments unfold. As a motif, they are as inspiring to Kohlstedt as the language of his hands is to us—music as a social condition.