Zubin Kanga lifted his hands off the piano and over his shoulders, slow-motion, Matrix-style, the fading resonance of the instrument twisting and morphing through electronics. Attached to the pianist’s hands were sensors – gravimeters and accelerometers – that triggered and controlled live electronics, allowing Kanga to shape the sounds with theremin-like conjurings. Shimmering piano gestures kaleidoscoped and accumulated in Patrick Nunn’s Morphosis, the work that put the cyborg in Kanga’s Cyborg Pianist programme.

While the name evokes the future, Kanga’s programme of works for piano, electronics and video – accompanied by Ben Carey controlling the electronics – looked back as often as it did forward, with 20th-century films providing fodder for much of the performance.

^{Zubin Kanga performing Nicole Lizée’s Hitchcock Études, photo © Zal Kanga-Parabia}

Nicole Lizée’s set of five Hitchcock Études combined piano, film and electronics, riffing on both musical and visual moments from the director’s films. Three etudes were from Psycho, while the remaining two drew on Doris Day’s rendition of Que Sera, Sera from The Man Who Knew Too Much and the school-house scene in The Birds. Stuttering, repeated film excerpts focused right in on individual moments of the...