Georg Friedrich Haas, Klangforum Wien

While visiting Hailun piano factory in Ningbo, China, Peter Paul Kainrath, artistic director of the Klangforum Wien ensemble, heard dozens of instruments played simultaneously, for hours on end, by automated machines, in order to test them. He shared the details of this experience with Haas, whose enthusiasm about the prospect of composing for such an outlandish size of ensemble was instant. Each piano is tuned to one fiftieth of a semitone higher than the previous one, creating a halo, an aura of minute micro-intervals, with the result that the ensemble becomes a single instrument, with eleven thousand strings giving rise to vast expanses of sound. Listening to them not on loudspeakers, but in concert, equates to experiencing the difference, as Haas tells us, between a storm or a flood seen on the television or that which we experience for real, in the flesh. With its sometimes ethereal, sometimes roaring beauty, alternating between arpeggios and magmatic, telluric rumblings, the space becomes charged with constantly changing atmospheres: what emerges is a whole field of energies, not unlike the forces of nature themselves.