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Argento Ensemble Presents US Premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's Atthis

Jul. 02, 2013

Argento Ensemble Presents US Premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas's <em>Atthis</em>

The Argento Ensemble welcomes Georg Friedrich Haas to New York City for the US premiere of Atthis, for soprano and ensemble, on July 2 at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City. Argento performs Atthis as the headlining piece on a program entitled The Expressionism of Georg Friedrich Haas. Atthis will be performed alongside Alban Berg's Adagio from his Kammerkonzert, Weberns’s Drei Stücke, Op. 11, and Schönberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19. Michel Galante of Argento Ensemble writes about Atthis:

In this 40-minute work, Haas sets Sappho’s erotic love poetry against the background of the instrumental combination of Franz Schubert’s Octet: string quintet, horn, clarinet, and bassoon. Whereas Haas’s focus on the lyric impulse harkens back to the Austrian tradition of the Schubertian lieder, his focus on musical innovation follows the tradition of modernist composers of the Second Viennese School.

The most recent Universal Edition Musikblätter offers a wonderfully informative feature article about Haas’s music including interviews with the composer himself and Sir Simon Rattle. Rattle conducted in vain in January at the Philharmonie Berlin and will premiere a new Haas work with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2014. The Maestro comments:

Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain is a really astonishing work of art…most of it sounds like simply nothing else at all. If you imagined a kind of Rothko painting in music, you might get close, because the piece, like these paintings, seems to throb and glow. One of the things about the paintings is, the longer you look, the more dynamic they seem to be. This is very, very true of this piece also.

At the climax of the work there are ten of the most astonishing minutes of music anybody has ever written, and it can only remind me of the level of music that Ligeti was writing, our most recent great composer… listen to it, experience it, it is really not quite like anything else. It requires patience and it requires trust, but it is a staggering experience and one of the first great masterpieces of the 21st century.

New York will be seeing a lot more of Georg Friedrich Haas in the near future.  He takes up his post on the composition faculty of Columbia University in August.

You can read the complete Haas article in Universal Edition’s Musikblätter, Issue 5, here.

If you can’t make it to Argento’s concert at the Austrian Cultural Forum, not to worry, as a performance of Atthis will be streamed live on the German BR Klassik internet radio on July 18.

Details on Argento’s performance can be found at www.argentomusic.org.

More on the life and work of Georg Friedrich Haas are located at www.universaledition.com.

Georg Friedrich Haas
Atthis (2009)
for soprano and eight instruments
cl.bsn.hn.2vn.va.vc
40’

in vain (2000)
for 24 instruments
2.1.2.1.sax-2.0.2.0-2perc-hp.acc.pno-3vn.2va.2vc.db
70’

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