
The piece lurking behind today’s Advent Calendar door is something of an amuse-bouche by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, titled ein kleines symphonisches Gedicht [a little symphonic poem]. Composed in 2017, its 7-minute duration is occupied with one of Haas’ typically focused behavioural-timbral explorations, looking at the way both transformation and juxtaposition can create interesting musical effects.
Transformation occurs immediately: a clear perfect fifth is quickly changed into something vague, clustery, quivering, before being pulled upward and garnished with one of the work’s main features, microtonal near-unisons in the brass. That quivering now becomes the work’s other key element, expanding to form a texture of trills, the colour and weight of which keeps shifting and tilting, shaded by deep brass pedals here, a timp accent there. More near-unisons trigger uncertainty, yet while the trills prevail for a time, an ensuing series of repeated clashes reveals that their apparently harder-edged microtonal friction is simply the thick end of the same wedge as the trills’ more delicate oscillations.
Having made this point, the opening perfect fifth reappears, and this now becomes the focus for the work’s closing episode. A rude, loud cluster challenges the fifth, which gracefully transforms, changing and sliding on soft strings. Seamlessly this yields to a strident brass sequence, almost melodic, culminating in a microtonally damaged version of the perfect fifth, closing as a fizzing microtonal tritone.
This performance of ein kleines symphonisches Gedicht was given by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle, at the 2017 Lucerne Festival.