When London Sinfonietta gave the British premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s In Vain in 2013, the piece could already be branded a cult classic. Simon Rattle has called it “one of the only acknowledged masterpieces” of 21st-century music. That’s some reputation – one to threaten even the edgiest new music with premature ageing.
The Sinfonietta’s latest outing suggests we need not worry. An announcement that ushers were equipped with night-vision goggles was a reminder that this was no average night at the musical museum. Haas specifies lighting for performances, including two periods of total darkness. The first comes close to the work’s opening, where liquid, slithering strings and unearthly sustained notes seemed designed to disorientate. The subsequent rapid descent into blackness was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.
Conventional tuning warped and buckled as Haas’s uncanny, uncomfortable soundworld closed in. But the piece’s power isn’t all about the darkness. The first re-illumination radiated outwards from the harp, as Helen Tunstall prised from it handfuls of beguilingly well-tempered chords. And the second blackout was punctuated by flashes of light, duetting with increasingly insistent tam-tam strokes and a gathering climax of orchestral shrieks.
When the lights were on, Brad Lubman conducted with invaluable clarity: sudden moments of silence were electric, his sense of pace impeccable. In light and dark alike, however, the orchestra maintained an astonishing intensity of communication. As familiar pitches veered into their microtonal penumbras, the sound remained ultra-blended, instruments morphing imperceptibly into each other, the orchestral fabric constantly in flux. An enthralling performance.
