I went to an afternoon concert on our last day in New York for a while. (It was also the first warm day after a very cold March and beginning of April.) It was performed by the Argento Ensemble (yet another New York new music group). It was in the St. Peters Church at Citicorp Center, a beautiful modern church, but a terrible place for a concert, as there was some kind of machine making noises on and off during the concert. The ostensible theme of the concert was "Conjugal Music", though the first piece was entitled "Sterbetourismus", referring to the phenomenon of people coming to Switzerland to die because of the liberal euthanasia laws there. Conjugal? Well, whatever.
The reason I went was that there were two recent pieces for ensemble by Georg Haas. It was disconcerting, though, when the ensemble started to play the third piece on the program listed as a piece by Haas, what began was Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll". At first I though Haas had gone all conceptual on us (I have always wondered why some conceptualist composer hasn't pulled a Sherrie Levine, and appropriated something like a Beethoven symphony as her or his own work. I guess the music world is less avant-garde than the visual arts world.) But it turns out that the program order had been shuffled, and although the conductor had made some introductory remarks, he had neglected to tell the audience of the program change. I wonder what the guy in front of me who was taking cell phone videos the entire time thought.
In any case, the two Haas works were finally played; both were written to celebrate his recent marriage. (The nature of his relationship to his spouse was covered on the front page of the NY Times arts section, I won't go in to it here.) The works were not as interesting as others I have heard of his; both were more concerned with melody than sonority, and I found both to be repetitious. They were also almost entirely for strings; I like Haas often for his diverse instrumental colors, which were lacking here. The second piece, a "wedding march" was one consistent acceleration of some rather basic almost Bartokian ideas. But when I realized that that was what was happening, and that was all that was happening, I became impatient for something unexpected or contrasted. It didn't happen. I did like the first piece on the program, by Ryan Beppel, which employed two conductors and created a dense and ever-changing sound world. Though I don't know what it had to do with death tourism.
