Friedrich Haas (b. 1953)
Violin Concerto No. 2 (2017)
de terrae fine for solo violin (2001)
Miranda Cuckson (violin)
ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/Markus Poschner
rec. live, 2011, New York; 2023, Musikverein, Vienna
Urlicht AudioVisual UAV-5967 [53]

Georg Friedrich Haas – clearly a composer not out to ingratiate himself – was born inGraz in Austria. He studied with Gösta Neuwirth and Iván Erőd at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz. A member of the city’s composers’ collective ‘Die andere Seite’, he has, in addition to his extensive compositional activities, taken a close interest in Luigi Nono, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Alois Hába, Pierre Boulez and – to break the trend – Franz Schubert. 

His extensive worklist is populated with, amongst much else, operas, a sextet for 3 violas and 3 cellos (1982), a double concerto for accordion, viola and chamber ensemble (1994), a Torso for large orchestra after the unfinished Piano Sonata in C major, D.840 by Franz Schubert (1999–2000) and at least 11 string quartets. His First Violin Concerto dates from 1998 but the present CD has the Second Violin Concerto as its headline. 

Stiffen your sinews for a big-boned capricious yet unremittingly serious concerto. It was written in 2017 for Miranda Cuckson, a long-time co-worker. It had its premiere with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov. Haas wrote the Concerto following a Cuckson’s performance of the other work on this disc. The Concerto is in nine segments (each titled), here separately tracked, and played without pause or interruption. As to Haas’s style it is tough yet impressive. It is not as far out as the concerto by Roger Sessions nor is it avant-garde but this does not stop it being hard as molybdenum and desperately serious. It makes no concessions to the romantics. Instead, we get something of a steam-punk lark in the ascendant. The writing is thoughtful and capricious but not flamboyant. The lark is often in torment; not in ecstasy. On reflection the protagonist is not so much a lark as a crow (Ted Hughes). Stiffen your sinews for a work of roiling awe, gaunt and molten. By contrast the de terrae fine for solo violin, recorded some years earlier, is a work rich in incident and a shade more extravagant than the Concerto.

The sound canvas in the Concerto places Cuckson’s violin commandingly in the footlights without suppressing the orchestral detail.

Rob Barnett

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