Meet Our Guest: Mirna Lekić
Between Worlds – From Sarajevo to New York: A Conversation on Cultural Crossings, Sonic Identity, and the Art of Connection
When I invited pianist and educator Mirna Lekić to The Piano Pod, I knew we would talk about culture, identity, and the piano as a living, breathing instrument. What I did not expect was how deeply her 2023 album, MIRAGE, would reshape the way I listen to the instrument I’ve played my whole life.
MIRAGE is described as “a collection of sonic illusions, allusions, and transformations,” and that is exactly how it feels. Over the course of the album, the piano becomes a traveler and a polyglot, moving from Azerbaijan to Spain, Armenia to Ukraine, Java to New York, without ever leaving the keyboard.
This album is not “world music on piano.” It is a serious, carefully curated exploration of how one instrument can hold many worlds at once: historical, cultural, emotional, and spiritual.
Listening to MIRAGE: The Piano as Traveler
From the very beginning, I felt like the piano was taking me on a journey across continents.
We start with Azerbaijani composer, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s Music for Piano, inspired by Azerbaijani mugham and the sound of the tar. A glass-bead necklace placed on the strings creates this shimmering, plucked resonance that makes me question everything I thought I knew about piano timbre. It was shocking in the best way — a completely new soundscape that still felt coherent and grounded.
From there, Mirna moves seamlessly into Albéniz’s Leyenda. On paper, it’s a huge jump: Azerbaijan to Spain, East to West. But in her hands, the transition feels natural — contrasting in tempo and mood, yet still part of one arc. I’ve heard Leyenda countless times, often treated as a showpiece, all about repeated notes and bravura. Mirna’s version is different. It isn’t about showing off her technique; it’s about understanding the culture, the guitar idiom, the composer, and the style. It’s a performance built on empathy rather than display.
Throughout the album, that is what kept striking me: the piano never stops being the piano.
There’s no gimmick, no attempt to flee the instrument. Instead, Mirna reveals how vast its vocabulary actually is — how much it can still surprise us if we listen past the “usual” European frame.
Soundscapes, Bells, and Memory
Several pieces in MIRAGE revolve around bells and resonance, but each one approaches that idea from a different angle.
In Igor Shamo’s Prelude in F♯ Minor, the bell imagery is emotional and atmospheric. For me, it felt almost like Debussy filtered through a darker lens: impressionistic harmonies, intensifying bells that start to feel like memory and announcement at once. It builds, like church bells echoing over a city, and pulls up something profound and uneasy.
Natalie Draper’s Fractured Bells lives in a more urban, conceptual space. No extended techniques, just pure writing and sound. The dissonances in the upper register at the beginning immediately tell you: these are not ceremonial church bells; these are fractured, splintered resonances, sending shockwaves into the surrounding silence.
Henry Cowell’s Aeolian Harp is one of the earliest extended-technique works for piano, played directly on the strings. Inside MIRAGE, it doesn’t feel like a historical “special effect.” It feels like a quiet axis: a moment where the piano, quite literally, becomes an instrument of wind and vibration rather than keys and hammers. Knowing its history adds weight, but in this context, it’s also part of a longer conversation about how composers have tried to reinvent the piano for over a century.
Mirna’s programming makes all of this feel intentional rather than random. You don’t just hear bells — you hear different philosophies of resonance, different ways of turning sound into memory and space.
Debussy, Godowsky, and How We “Translate” Culture
The pairing of Debussy’s Pagodes and Godowsky’s Gamelan from the Java Suite was a revelation for me.
After the extreme physicality and gesture of Lachenmann’s Guero — all scraping, swiping, and non-traditional notation — it is strangely refreshing to land in Debussy. Pagodes is a “familiar” repertoire for many pianists, but inside this album, it feels newly disruptive. It reminds you how far ahead of his time he was: treating the piano as a resonance instrument, dissolving melody into texture, importing gamelan-inspired sonorities without turning them into caricature.
Then comes Godowsky’s Gamelan, which, to my ear, feels more like a travel diary with denser patterns, interlocking figures, and a more literal attempt to mimic gamelan textures on the keyboard. If Debussy gives you the aura of gamelan, Godowsky gives you something closer to its surface complexity.
Hearing them together in this context made me rethink what it means to “translate” one musical culture into another. And that is very much at the heart of MIRNA’s conceptual world.
The Final Stretch: Harps, Mbira, and the Edge of the Instrument
The last part of the album forms its own arc:
Cowell’s Aeolian Harp — Prokofiev’s Prelude in C Major — Martin Scherzinger’s The Horse Is Not Mine, a Hobby Horse, inspired by mbira music.
I’ve assigned the Prokofiev prelude to students before, but I’ll admit: I hadn’t really heard its “bell” or “harp” quality until Mirna pointed it out. Within this sequence, it becomes the perfect bridge: grounding us again in a seemingly simple, traditional texture between two works that stretch the piano in very different directions.
Scherzinger’s piece, based on mbira (thumb piano) textures, is a brilliant closer. A simple, almost pentatonic tune; shifting rhythms; what feels like unstable meter — all echoing the cyclic, layered world of African plucked instruments. It really does feel like the last stop in a long travelogue, one that leaves you with a sense of motion and unresolved curiosity rather than a bombastic, climactic ending.
What MIRAGE Taught Me About Programming and Culture
What stayed with me most was how much the album concept matters.
MIRAGE is not a random collection of “cool” contemporary pieces plus a few standards. It’s a carefully thought-out program where each piece is in conversation with the others. You can absolutely drop into individual tracks, but to really understand what Mirna is doing, you have to hear the whole arc — like a mixtape or a playlist where sequencing is part of the storytelling.
For me, this album:
Expanded my understanding of cultural diversity in music beyond “representation” or tokenism.
Showed how deeply one has to understand culture: language, history, geography, and lived experience, to program this way with integrity.
Renewed my appreciation for pieces I thought I already knew, like Estampes and Leyenda. Placed in this context, they came back to me in a completely new light.
Knowing Mirna’s life story — growing up in Sarajevo, living through war, rebuilding her life and career in New York — intensifies the listening experience. But what I admire most is that she doesn’t present herself as a victim or a symbol. She is a working artist and educator who believes, very simply and very firmly, that:
“Music is an antidote to suffering and ugliness, and I strive for beauty in all its variety.”
You hear that in every decision on this album: in the sound, in the programming, in the way past and present, “center” and “periphery” are allowed to stand side by side without hierarchy.
How I Hope You’ll Listen
If you decide to explore MIRAGE before or after the episode, my honest suggestion is simple:
Just press play and let the whole album run.
Listen while you cook, walk, clean, commute. Don’t overthink the styles or the extended techniques. See where it takes you.
Somewhere along the way, you may find a kind of inner oasis — a quiet, unexpected place where all these sounds, histories, and cultures start to feel less like fragments and more like part of one larger conversation.
That’s what Mirna’s work — and this episode of The Piano Pod — reminded me: the piano is not just an instrument of the past.
It’s a living site where cultures meet, collide, echo, and transform.
🎧 Catch the Full Episode
This episode will premiere on Tuesday, December 9, at 8:00 pm ET on our YouTube channel and wherever you listen to podcasts.
In this conversation, we explore Mirna’s groundbreaking album MIRAGE and dive into the themes of cultural crossings, sonic identity, artistic resilience, and the power of connection in contemporary piano work.
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