Two stable voices, a rotation of perspectives.
Conangla/Luksts is soprano Andrea Conangla and pianist Jana Luksts. Both studied at the HMDK Stuttgart and now work from Berlin. The name changes with each production: sometimes Conangla/Luksts, sometimes Luksts/Conangla.
Instead of recital programmes, the duo creates self-contained productions for voice and piano. Each one starts from a single idea, and the repertoire, staging and visual language grow out of it.
Their roles move with the concept. Sometimes they are simply soprano and pianist; at other times they direct, perform or curate.
It works like a kaleidoscope: two fixed elements set at an angle to each other. Turn it, and a new pattern appears. Each project is one such turn, a new combination of voice, piano, staging and authorship from the same two artists.
Got Lost (Helmut Lachenmann), from the album Autopsychografia (2024)
Tidal ↗︎ · YouTube Music ↗︎
Andrea Conangla, soprano. Portuguese-Spanish singer whose work spans historically informed performance, virtuosic new opera and music theatre and, increasingly, her own practice as composer-improviser and stage director; she teaches contemporary music at the HMT Leipzig.
andreaconangla.com ↗︎
Jana Luksts, piano. Canadian-Latvian pianist devoted to experimental and contemporary music, from complexist and graphic scores to performances that combine speech and movement; a founding member of the three-piano trio f:t, she has worked closely with Helmut Lachenmann and Michael Finnissy.
janaluksts.com ↗︎
2025
A personal visual translation of the sound world of Helmut Lachenmann's Got Lost (2007/08) for voice and piano.
Andrea Conangla and Jana Luksts worked on Got Lost with Helmut Lachenmann himself. Lachenmann conceived the piece to be experienced through listening alone. Over the countless hours spent learning it, Andrea found that it also reached her in other ways: she began to experience the music synaesthetically, and Lachenmann's sound world filled her days with images. She chose to follow them.
Andrea belongs to a very visual generation, and she hoped this music could also reach people who take in sound through other senses. The visual translation grew from that wish, as a way into the piece rather than a replacement for listening.
The work passed through several hands. It started with Andrea. Then a focus group of musicians, architects, teachers, software developers and others listened to the piece fragment by fragment and described what each passage made them see. Their images were matched with principles of mathematics and geometry to find the forms closest to the music.
Visual artist Svitlana Zhytnia gave the work its final form. She built it in TouchDesigner, but this is not AI or generative art. Every form comes from her analysis of the music and her own artistic choices.
In concert, the visuals respond to the music in real time. Svitlana decides which forms are triggered and from which microphone, so she plays as part of the ensemble.
Funded by Musikfonds (Stip II).
A Carta (2023) by Sofia Borges was originally written for voice and cello and is part of the album Autopsychografia.
Jana Luksts adapted the piece to the language of the piano, drawing on extended techniques and on the musical understanding the duo has built over years of working together. Conangla/Luksts presents this version in concert.
A Carta was commissioned by Projecto DME.
Fernando Pessoa and Helmut Lachenmann never met. Lachenmann was born in November 1935, just days before Pessoa died. Lachenmann's Got Lost sets words by Álvaro de Campos, one of Pessoa's heteronyms. Autopsychografia starts there and adds three new songs by composers of today, Igor C. Silva, Sofia Borges and Sara Glojnarić.
On the album Autopsychografia, each piece is recorded with its own instrumentation. In concert, Conangla/Luksts performs the programme for voice and piano. The new songs become part of the duo's repertoire and are adapted to its sound world, alongside Got Lost with live visuals by Svitlana Zhytnia.
The new commissions were funded by INSZENE:Vokal of the Deutscher Musikrat, Projecto DME, Musikfonds and Fundação GDA. With the support of Casa Museu Fernando Pessoa.
no fe·mi·ni·no (“in the feminine”) is Andrea Conangla's reflection on the voice of women in society, art and culture. The programme moves across more than two centuries, from classical song to conceptual music and pop culture, and opens with Quando m'en vo from La Bohème, reworked for voice, piano, electronics and video.
At its centre is Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben (A Woman's Love and Life, 1840), a classical song cycle few would expect in this context. Its poems by Adelbert von Chamisso describe a woman's life through a man's eyes: devotion, marriage, motherhood, loss. The duo does not rework or subvert the cycle. Heard beside works by composers of today, it speaks for itself.
Putting unexpected works side by side is how the duo builds its programmes, and it lets a concert make a political point through the music itself. The German Lied tradition is central to Conangla/Luksts as artists, and their approach to Schumann's music and Chamisso's poetry is deeply respectful. It is also personal, shaped by their own lives and experiences.
Kaiko explores sleep, sleeplessness and the thresholds between waking and sleeping, starting from the idea of lullabies for adults who cannot sleep. Poetry is at its heart, with the work of Misuzu Kaneko and Sylvia Plath as points of departure.
Imagined as a night-long concert and installation, Kaiko will invite the audience to move freely between listening situations, to linger, read and rest, until a final musical moment at sunrise.
In development with the support of Yaritori, Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, the Embassy of Portugal in Japan and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. More soon.
About the Yaritori residency ↗︎
„Man spürt die innige Verbundenheit.“
You can feel the deep bond between them.
„… ein Gesamtkunstwerk der verblüffenden Art.“
… a total work of art of the most astonishing kind. (On Got Lost with live visuals by Svitlana Zhytnia at Open Music Graz.)
— Kronen Zeitung (Steiermark), Kultur, p. 42
“Lachenmann não busca a melodia, ele esculpe o silêncio.”
Lachenmann does not look for melody; he sculpts silence.
“Andrea Conangla é mais que uma intérprete; ela é a viajante que nos guia por este terreno incerto.”
Andrea Conangla is more than a performer; she is the traveller who guides us through this uncertain terrain.
— Vítor Rua, Rimas e Batidas ↗︎
On Weird Sound 𝄐 with Andrea Conangla, Jana Luksts talks from New York about commuting between New York and Berlin, meeting Helmut Lachenmann, and preparing and recording Got Lost for the album Autopsychografia.
On Weird Sound 𝄐 with Andrea Conangla, composer Igor C. Silva talks about creative honesty, poetry versus lyrics, and imperfection and vulnerability as aesthetic choices in Vou, his new song for Autopsychografia.
On Weird Sound 𝄐 with Andrea Conangla, composer Sara Glojnarić talks about identity, “geographically mapping melancholy”, a sense of home, Beyoncé, and THE POET IS A FAKER, her new piece for Autopsychografia.
“O feminismo não é uma estética.”
Feminism is not an aesthetic.
An article on the ideas behind no fe·mi·ni·no. The project began as Andrea Conangla's master's final project in Germany, a work about the body and her daily experience as a woman and a singer, built on the feminist idea that the personal is political, and also creative material.
— Ricardo da Rocha, Público, Ípsilon ↗︎