Amplified piano solo + live video ad lib.

2015/25

~ 15'

Score + recording

"[...] it was less a composition than a 15-minute torture session, in which the keys were pounded with such relentless ferocity that the piano came to resemble a machine unleashing impossible waves of reverberant fury. A mind-blowing experience, one went away from it feeling drained and spent." Beyond mere novelty, Simon Cummings - Dissonance 141, March 2018, p. 39-40)

"Pianist Aljosja Buijs made a strong impression with the piece flagellatio ii (torso) by Raphaël Languillat. A kind of maximal minimal music, where he set the piano into exuberant singing with one or two powerfully struck notes. Out of the mêlée, melodies seemed to emerge, though that process might just as well have been happening in your own mind. Compare it to a squadron of B-17s at 30,000 feet, heading for Schweinfurt." Eddy Determeyer - Draai om je oren, April 2024

"The contrast could hardly be greater when Joonas Ahonen sits down at the grand piano to hammer out the notes in Raphaël Languillat's flagellatio ii (torso). With full force, completely unconcerned about where the boundary of a beautiful forte lies, he hammers out so many Cs that the overtones begin to spin in your head. The noise pours out over the raw concrete, creating a rough impression. But this, if anything, is rock. Gradual harmonic shifts begin to emerge, events glide into and merge with each other, more or less seamlessly. Only Alvin Lucier's ten-minute triangle orgy Silver Streetcar has so far outdone Languillat in its focus on a single tone." Wilhelm Kvist - Hufvudstadsbladet, September 2025

"[…] the final catharsis: flagellatio ii (torso) by Raphaël Languillat. Inspired by the pictorial chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, the work strips the piano of its traditional lyricism to transform it into a body pushed to its limits through an obsessive, violent, and sculptural pulse. Ahonen’s performance then takes on an almost liturgical dimension, where the physical effort and the instrument’s massive resonance reveal a raw and disturbing beauty." 

Festival Internacional Cervantino, 2026

14/10/2016 - Gilles Grimaître | Moritzkirche - Augsburg (DE)