The Greek pianist Tania Giannouli meets the Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær at Cadogan Hall on Friday 20 November 2026, part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.
Tania Giannouli is a Greek pianist and composer who has released everything she has made on Rattle Records, a small art-music label in New Zealand, which tells you most of what you need to know about how she works. Five albums: Forest Stories with the Portuguese wind player Paulo Chagas, Transcendence for her own ensemble, Rewa — entirely improvised, with the Māori instrumentalist Rob Thorne — In Fading Light with trumpet and oud, and Solo in 2023. Transcendence is named in Greece as one of the records of its decade. In 2024 Nils Frahm invited her onto the Piano Day compilation.
Nils Petter Molvær came to the trumpet from the other direction: the Norwegian who put the instrument through electronics in the 1990s and made a generation of jazz musicians rethink what the horn was for. He has recorded for ECM and scored films, and his 1997 album Khmer is still cited as the record that opened the territory.
They play Cadogan Hall on Friday 20 November 2026 at half past seven, with Elliot Galvin and Laura Jurd also on the bill, inside the London jazz festival. The duo is a study in opposites that turns out to agree: Giannouli works inside the piano with objects, Molvær blows through electronics or straight into her strings, and the whole thing improvises across genre rather than picking one.