A piano concerto is heard not just twice but simultaneously in a darkened room. Larger-than-life, the left hands of two concert pianists glide, dance, or hammer across the keyboards. Louis Lortie and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet are both playing Maurice Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche (1930) at once. Their tempi vary with the two soundtracks drifting apart like waves, only to join up again shortly afterwards.

Each pianist is accompanied by the Orchestre National de France, so that one hears two pianists and two orchestras playing at once throughout the entire projection, with all four elements continuously going in and out of sync with each other.Here, too, the musicians – piano and orchestra – drift apart due to differences in tempo. Performed with unwavering virtuosity, the double-track recording reveals diverse musical patterns that span the (dis)harmony spectrum: traces of jazz music or a repetitive tapestry of superimposed sound much like the minimalist music composed by Steve Reich or Philip Glass decades after Ravel.

To a large extent, sound depends on the properties of the space in which it is heard; a space can make a tone sound duller or clearer. Anri Sala created a room in which the sound reflections have been reduced but not eliminated altogether in order to help viewers locate themselves in the spatial environment and to identify the interval between the two pianists. With the almost synchronous piano parts, with their echo and with the ebb and flow of our attention, Anri Sala gives us a spatial experience that would seem to have two coordinates. Here the sound creates the space.

Dissonance already marked the genesis of Concerto pour la main gauche. Maurice Ravel composed the piece in 1930 for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War I and therefore required compositions that could be played with one hand. Wittgenstein’s own adaptations in performing the new piece and Ravel’s insistence on a faithful interpretation led to a rift.

Ravel Ravel was presented in 2013 as a French contribution to the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and was acquired by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation that same year. Ravel Ravel Interval is an adapted version that was first shown at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, 2017/18. Here, Sala decided not to project the two videos one above the other, but rather suspended one behind the other on two semitransparent screens. Thus, in this installation, the two pi­ano voices not only overlap audibly, but also echo each other visually.