Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston, MA 02115
I’m excited to play Vln 1 with Alarm Will Sound for Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Thursday Night Music in Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain, one of the defining works of the 21st century. Scored for 24 players and conducted by Alan Pierson, the hour-long piece moves through passages of total darkness, where the musicians play from memory and listen their way through music that seems to spiral endlessly upward and back on itself.
Haas tunes the ensemble into shimmering, microtonal harmonies that never quite settle—beautiful, unstable, and impossible to pin down. Written in 2000 in response to the political moment in his native Austria, in vain carries the weight of its title: a reckoning with cycles that repeat no matter how hard we try to break them. It is a piece to be heard in a single, immersive sitting.