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Georg Friedrich Haas' in vain Returns to New York City

Feb. 01, 2011

The pioneering new music group Argento Ensemble, under the direction of Michel Galante, reprise Georg Friedrich Haas’ monumental work in vain at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan on February 18. The event at the armory marks the third performance of in vain in the US, with Argento presenting the acclaimed US premiere at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre in 2009 as well as a performance at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in upstate New York in November of 2010. Vivien Schweitzer of the New York Times wrote of the US premiere:

As waves of opulently strange, beautiful sounds flooded the Miller Theater on Friday evening during the American premiere of In Vain, it often seemed that supernatural forces were at work … descending scales cascaded like hundreds of iridescent sonic waterfalls, the undulating waves of sound swelling, then melting into strange growls as the theater was immersed in darkness. The delicate strains of a harp rose above the subdued murmur as the darkness receded…

… The music hovered between consonance and dissonance, swelling and contracting to fever-pitch intensity and subdued murmurings. It was often hard to believe that these otherworldly sounds were coming from acoustic, not electronic, instruments … The kaleidoscopic, throbbing tapestry built to an almost overwhelming intensity toward the end, with brief fragments from the harp piercing the darkness like invisible arrows. The euphoria finally faded into a weary stillness...

Learn more on the life and music of Georg Friedrich Haas at www.universaledition.com.

Listen to an excerpt from in vainhere.

Details on the performance can be found at www.argentomusic.org and www.armoryonpark.org.

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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