Preparing for the North American premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s “11,000 Strings” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Photo by Stephanie Berger.
In Wednesday’s (10/1) New York Times, Joshua Barone writes, “Piano plunks resonated from opposite ends of the immense drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory…. Technicians were at work … to tune the pianos … Each one, made by Hailun, had more than 200 strings, all of which needed to be tuned to specific frequencies using an app called TuneLab…. They had 50 pianos to prepare for the North American premiere a few days later of Georg Friedrich Haas’s ‘11,000 Strings,’ running at the Armory through Oct. 7. Haas calls for the instruments to be arranged in a vast circle, surrounding about 1,300 seats. The 25 players of the ensemble Klangforum Wien are dotted throughout, in front of every other piano…. The differences between each piano, detailed in a spreadsheet of frequencies, are microtonal. While difficult to perceive the change from one instrument to the next, their cumulative uncanniness registers immediately. At the scale of Haas’s score, listeners will hear sounds that are joltingly strange yet awe-inspiring in their effect…. Remarkably for contemporary music, and especially for a work of this size, it has toured widely with Klangforum Wien … Each performance has drawn from local communities of pianists.”
