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Argento Ensemble Celebrates Haas at 2010 Moving Sounds Festival

Sep. 07, 2010

New York’s Argento Ensemble focused on the music of Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas during their 2010 Moving Sounds Festival earlier this month. Six performances throughout New York City at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Bohemian National Hall, and Le Poisson Rouge featured five different Haas works, headlined by the world premiere of a new arrangement of the monodrama Atthis for octet, and the U.S. premiere of Phantasien, a duet for viola and clarinet. The New York Times' Steve Smith writes of the premiere performance of Atthis:

A love song this may have been, but one whose ancient threads felt wound into contemporary sensations of anxiety and isolation. An opening spurt of babbling winds fused into a throbbing microtonal mass, buffeted and lofted by shivering strings. Occasionally a lone wind instrument would emerge to sound a plaintive note or melancholy melody; at times consonant chords and intervals coalesced as if from nowhere, otherworldly visitations.

Haas’ work, Unheimat for spatialized string ensemble, was also performed twice at concerts at the Bohemian National Hall on September 3. This work, whose title translates to “non-home,” has an important visuo-spatial component: the strings are divided into three separate groups with the lone double bassist positioned in the chasm between the first and second groups, barely playing, an “outsider,” according to Haas. In an interview with Florian Olters, the composer compares the role of this lonely bass to his own outsider status when he lived in Vorarlberg in the Austrian Alps for 16 years, a place in which he couldn’t speak the dialect and was a protestant among a strong catholic majority. The title of the work, according to Haas, expresses both “the longing for somewhere to call home, on the one hand, and the fact that this home does not exist.”

For more on the Argento Ensemble, please visit www.argentomusic.org

For more on Georg Friedrich Haas, please visit: www.universaledition.com

Georg Friedrich Haas
Atthis (2010)
monodrama for soprano and eight instruments or for instruments alone
cl.bsn.hn-str(1.1.1.1.1)
40'

Georg Friedrich Haas
Unheimat (2009)
for 19 string instruments
11vn.4va.3vc.db

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