ATTHIS

Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas is a leading figure in European contemporary music. The soundworld he creates is one of microtones and shimmering, nocturnal shadows. Netia Jones (Kafka Fragments) directs an immersive new staging of Haas’s Second String Quartet and his song cycle ATTHIS, based on the ancient love poetry of the Greek poet Sappho and described by the New York Times as ‘a shockingly intimate conjuring of emotional intensity’.

ATTHIS (2009) takes its name from a student of Sappho, one of the women of Lesbos to whom Sappho sang her poems. Haas’s song cycle for soprano and ensemble becomes a haunting search for Atthis and the reawakening of Eros. Haas’s Second String Quartet (1998) was commissioned for the Hagen Quartet and has become a key work in his repertory; the composer describes it as ‘a sometimes virtuoso, flickering sound picture [where] tradition shines through again and again, but as something lost, distant, clouded.’