Haas: Violinkonzert, für Violine und Orchester

The Violin Concerto begins
with a breakneck gesture – the solo violin playing its topmost G sharp – like
the first step of a tightrope walker, a chord in the strings supporting the
violin’s sound to ward off the danger of falling. Comprised of fifths and
tritones like so many in Haas’ later works, it is not merely the fundamental or
root of the melody pitch; it is the imaginary sonic space the composer detected
from the violin’s pitch and transferred to the orchestra – a compositional
approach not hoping for reminiscences of melodic passages, but captured in the
fascinating inner life of an individual sound: an approach, therefore, which is
often referred to as a counterpart to “traditional compositional procedures,”
although it can look back on almost 40 years of tradition.

The soloist’s line is the
work’s starting point – and its lonely end. The orchestra (a large one, for a
violin concerto – triple winds, large string group) acts on the violin’s music
by intensifying it, surrounding it and grinding it between the blades of
interlocked chords. Haas aligns with
an imagery currently in use for solo concertos; line and space are not
juxtaposed like categories of music theory – instead, they are symbols of individuality
and totality. Pitch and chord approach each other again and again (Haas speaks
of “solidarisation”) – but the partnership does not last long.

In the course of the
composition, the sonic spaces in the orchestra harden, fit to each other like pavestones,
the violin physically (= dynamically) and vainly trying to run up against them.
Yet elsewhere, the violin is displayed in the foreground, like a prima donna,
tonality is cited (a vocabulary Haas has been working with again and again
since his 1995/96 Hölderlin opera Nacht) –
but the accompanying orchestra groups are not coordinated. The chords intensify
to attack, the attacks deploy to form a pulse, the pulse marches with ostinato
equanimity, even if staged with high compositional artifice. (Toward the end,
such an ostinato accelerates while the volume simultaneously decreases,
overridden by another ostinato pulsating more slowly).

In his Piano Concerto Fremde Welten (premièred by Wien Modern 1997), the composer’s
entire attention was devoted to the issue of material by juxtaposing the
tempered piano with a group of strings consisting exclusively of flageolet
pitches on open strings, each of which was tuned differently on every
instrument. The dramatic development of his Violin Concerto is directed by
abstract musical criteria: texture, gesture, event density. At the same time,
proceeding from the concerto form with its confrontation of soloist and
orchestra, Haas commits to a dramatization of the course of action not unworthy
of any operatic scene. This is music of an expressive quality which leaves the
most carefully tended hotbed forgotten – it hovers now before Haas, an image of
perfection.

Christoph Becher

Georg Friedrich Haas on the Violin Concerto:

I don't understand the
solo concerto in the sense of the romantic virtuoso concerto, where the soloist
dazzles and shows off as a brilliant individual, as the leader of a collective.
For me, the concerto format is an opportunity to explore how an individual
behaves towards a collective. So I don't present a brilliant soloist dominating
the ensemble, but a figure that demonstrates the resonances in the piece. And
there are also moments where the soloist really gets beaten down by the
ensemble, almost until there's nothing left of him.