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Mozart composed concertos for two and three pianos; Liszt (with the help of Chopin and a few other virtuosi) composed the Hexaméron for six pianos. But a work for 50 pianos? Georg Friedrich Haas’s 11,000 Strings is the result of a commission from Peter Paul Kainrath, artistic director of the new music ensemble Klangforum Wien, who had heard 100 pianos being tested simultaneously on a visit to the Hailun piano factory in China.
The hour-long composition, premiered in Bolzano in 2023 and performed elsewhere in Europe, now makes its North American debut. Kainrath has described 11,000 Strings as a “concert installation”, and the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall in New York’s Park Avenue Armory is an ideal venue for such an outsized musical event.
Much of Haas’s music employs microtones, and here the upright pianos are each tuned a 100th of a tone apart, a difference barely perceptible to the human ear. But with 50 pianos, each with its own pianist, accompanied by 25 members of the Klangforum Wien chamber orchestra, the Austrian-born composer (currently a professor at Columbia University) is able to create an astonishing palette of colours and a remarkable array of sounds, including revving engines, swarming insects, bell ringing, animal cries, howling winds, peals of thunder and even underwater gurgling.
In these performances, the audience is surrounded by the 50 upright pianos arranged in a huge oval, with each pair of pianos joined by a member of Klangforum Wien. As the music is conceived spatially, ideas that seem to start far in the distance gradually work their way towards you in waves (or away from you, depending on where you’re sitting).
Haas has a sure sense of drama, so there’s an ebb and flow that almost suggests a narrative. At the beginning, for example, pure tonal harmonies kissed by angelic strumming from the harp are dispelled by the visceral rumbling of 50 pianos in their lowest register. And he shows he has a sense of humour as well. About halfway through, the pianos start playing big tonal chords resulting in an effect that’s rather like hearing a clown car’s worth of virtuosi reflected in an acoustic funhouse mirror.
The pianists in this performance — all emerging or established artists from local conservatories and universities — clearly relished their parts, while the Klangforum Wien musicians (each of whom also doubled on a percussion instrument) are now practised hands at meeting the work’s complex synchronisation challenges.
As I was leaving the Armory I heard one audience member describe the music as “trippy”. They’re not wrong, but 11,000 Strings is often surprisingly beautiful, too — and strangely moving.
★★★★★
To October 7, armoryonpark.org
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