The Chicago-based Opera Cabal partners with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (cond. Peyman Farzinpour) to present the first North American stage premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’ monodrama ATTHIS, with lyrics by the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

Emmy Award-winning stage director Habib Azar directs the production, which premières on 12 June.

View the full score.

Albrecht Dümling on ATTHIS:

Georg Friedrich Haas begins his composition (named after a young girl who was Sappho’s pupil) with consonant sounds, as the voice emerges almost imperceptibly from the swelling major third in several string octaves. In slow motion, as it were, the singer recites the Greek words mete moi meli, mete melissa [“no honey for me, no bees”] on a single pitch – a lover’s lament, sung while the major third first turns gradually into a minor third, then a tritone and finally a seventh.

Then the German words untergegangen ist der Mond [“the moon is sunken”] follow, first as if spoken and then sung in cantabile melisma. The score calls for three types of singing: rough, in the lowest register, almost spoken, then cantabile,espressivo and melodious and, thirdly, as glissando, whereby the three types of singing must be clearly differentiated: “The effect should be like that of changing instruments, or imitating a vocal trio.”

Read the full text.

Georg Friedrich Haas: ATTHIS
for soprano and 8 instruments | 40'
staged prem. 12. and 13.06.2014, The Kitchen, New York; Ariadne Greif, s; ACME, cond. Peyman Farzinpour