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Georg Friedrich Haas's New Work Poème Premieres at The Cleveland Orchestra

Mar. 01, 2006

"My music is composed as a journey from one state to the next," writes Georg Friedrich Haas about his new work Poème for The Cleveland Orchestra, which premieres it on March 23 conducted by music director Franz Welser-Most. "'Form' in the traditional sense does not interest me. What I wish to achieve is a sequence of ever-changing sections, composed to form a continuous process. There is no recapitulation, no developing variation, no dialectic process involving two contrasting forms: only a ‘Being There’ (Da-Sein) of different states of sound."

Indeed, Haas is known and increasingly admired not only for the surprising structures of his musical creations but for his experimentation with the essence of sound itself. A sense of floating constellations of overtones has lent a new quality of radicalism to Haas’ sound since the composition of his First String Quartet in 1997. Novel sound-worlds and structures are also hallmarks of such works as the daring ensemble piece in vain (2000), in which harmonic forms derived from overtone rows collide with tritones, fourths and fifths, and in the Violin Concerto (1998); or, in quite a different, more traditional fashion, in the orchestral work Torso, an orchestration of Schubert's unfinished piano sonata in C major, D.840, in which the addition of saxophones and accordion provides distinctive color. This fascination with sound continues in the recent 7 Klangraume (7 Sound Rooms) for choir and orchestra, commissioned by the International Mozarteum Salzburg for the Mozart year and premiered in Salzburg in December. Sharing the same instrumentation as Mozart's Requiem, Haas's piece is conceived with fragments of the Requiem that Mozart left behind in mind. These fragments act as a type of skeleton on which the new 'seven sound rooms' are composed, heard as reverberations after and between the movements of Mozart's Requiem.

In addition to the world premiere of Poème, other noteworthy upcoming events in the composer's calendar include a European tour of in vain by Klangforum Wien this summer.

To learn more about Georg Friedrich Haas and Poème, please visit The Cleveland Orchestra at www.clevelandorch.com and Universal Edition at www.universaledition.com

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