Sarah Nicolls: The Open Fund for Music Creators

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12 Years' UK-wide tour: a climate recital-story with Inside-Out Piano

Sarah says: “This hour-long work is my response to the IPCC Special Report, 2018, where we were told that we had 12 years to radically change our behaviour to save the planet. Except it’s only 10 years now. My 12 tracks divide into reality – actual headlines and real people like Greta Thunberg and David Wallace-Wells talking about climate breakdown – and fiction – where 3 characters talk to each other on the phone about their lives. There are also some wordless tracks, one of a glacier melting and one about hope in the face of such huge news. I wanted to make a recital to give an audience time and space to think about the issue, to really feel it and to leave the room with a sense of what could be done, proactive hope.”

Sarah Nicolls is an innovative pianist and composer. She plays her unique ‘Inside-out Piano’, a sculptural re-shaped grand piano which stands 2.5m tall, using the strings to create layers of textured sound. In 2020, her company Future Piano will be building a new lightweight version using carbon fibre and aerospace engineering, collaborating with the extraordinary piano builder David Klavins.

Sarah has been a frequent soloist on the new music scene, is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and features on several CDs. Since 2017, she has had artist residencies at Southbank Centre’s Collision programme, Artangel’s Library of Water in Iceland, an Arvon writing centre and Snape Maltings’ Festival of New.