MARTIN KOHLSTEDT - Live 2026

Conflict is written across Martin Kohlstedt's face. Whether the composer and pianist connects with the audience for a moment or retreats into his refuge of keyboards with steel strings and synthesizers, the tension remains. His gaze searches relentlessly, piercing through space and anticipating the mind by heartbreaking moments. As a musician, this is a risk - a provocative play at the edge of his own control. As a composer, it has concept. Kohlstedt, unmistakably a man from Thuringia, has become known worldwide precisely for the energy and unpredictability of his concerts. He has performed at the Russian State Library, the Iranian Talar-e Rudaki, and in the sold-out grand hall of Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie. Yet there is no pose of grand spectacle here, only a different way of thinking about music and communicating through it: there are no finished works, but rather compositional building blocks whose power lies in the potential of their combinability and variations. These modules, as Kohlstedt calls them, create unpredictable points and conflicts in their connections.

This applies not only to his concerts. Already on the sister albums "Tag" and "Nacht" (2012 / 2014), the recording feels like a necessary evil, capturing one of his forms. We witness voyeuristically Kohlstedt's encounter with his home piano. With "Strom" (2017), the templates of the stage figure and his instrument finally dissolve in an intoxicating swirl of piano melodies and electronic landscapes. There is no longer a boundary between new and old, between analog and digital instrumentation. Sound and structure yield to the desire to simply allow moments to unfold. As a motif, they inspire Kohlstedt as much as the language of his hands inspires us - music as a social state.