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Argento Chamber Ensemble Performs US Premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas' in vain at Miller Theatre

Feb. 02, 2009

On Friday, February 6, the Argento Chamber Ensemble performs the US premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas' seminal work in vain at Columbia University's Miller Theatre. In the epilogue of his book The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross states that in vain "may mark a new departure in Austro-German music, joining spectral harmony to a vast Brucknerian structure." The audience at Miller Theatre is in for a truly unique concert experience as Argento, led by music director Michel Galante, perform the work largely from memory with the concert hall bathed in complete darkness as precisely timed flashes of strobe lights punctuate the performance. Michel Galante comments on the much anticipated performance:

With in vain, Georg Friedrich Haas confronts, head on, a harmonic dilemma that has plagued every composer since Bach: the attempt to reconcile the overtone series with equal divisions of the octave. Haas tells the story of this sisyphean task in all its splendor and futility. The piece almost forces the listeners into another dimension by throwing the listener into darkness. We become face-to-face with the sounds and vibrations as they attempt to work themselves out ad infinitum, and we experience our own eternal tendency to try and fit a musical square peg into a round hole. The slow, periodic strobes take snapshots of this glacial effort as it unfolds. It's incredible, just incredible.

View the Argento Chamber Ensemble's preview film on the performance, featuring comments by Austrian composer Bernhard Lang, at www.argentomusic.org.

For precise ticketing information, visit www.millertheatre.com.

To learn more on the music of Georg Friedrich Haas, go to www.universaledition.com.

Georg Friedrich Haas
in vain (2000)
for 24 instruments
2.1.2.sax.1-2.0.2.0-2perc-hp.acc-str
70'

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