Haas - Konzert for piano and orchestra

The
concerto form fascinates me, much to my own surprise. My
first work in the genre was my Violin
Concerto, in which I very deliberately and precisely composed a contrast
between and individual and a collective, whereby it is especially appropriate
that the solo instrument is also in the orchestra (multiplied by 30), thus
already founding the opposition of individual and group in the orchestration alone.

On the
other hand, the piano is an instrument which is fundamentally set apart from
the orchestra. Here, I wish to formulate s personal affinity with or aversion
to the piano; I was once a pianist in the past and I believe I became a
composer because too much was lacking at the piano. Every point of
concentration in my music is impossible on the piano: microtonality, Klangfarbe, pitch clashes and slow
dynamic developments – so I thought it would be fascinating to use the very
instrument which was somehow foreign to the entirety. My first piano concerto
(premiered in 1996 in the Konzerthaus)
was entitled Fremde Welten [“Foreign
Worlds”]; I hope that that strange peculiarity of sound will be recognisable
again in this new piano concerto.

There
will be moments in which the orchestra plays microtones, surges of Klangfarben and dynamics while the
soloist juxtaposes an entirely different, pianistic world. And then there is
something which has always fascinated me about the piano – something overused
by poor pianists, i.e. the damper pedal. Thus it is a major aspect of this work
to set a sonic occurrence in motion and then simply let it resonate. Pitches
begin as piano sounds; they linger first in the piano before roving to the
orchestra, where they begin to live – as beautiful as the lingering sound of
the piano is, it is actually a dead echo; it is there, but one cannot influence
it anymore, and one can only listen to it as it gradually disappears. It was
that aspect which intrigued me.

Georg
Friedrich Haas

Translation Copyright © 2012 by Grant Chorley