Parlando confronts darkness and history in Haas’s unsettling ‘in vain’ | EarRelevant

CONCERT REVIEW:

Parlando
February 22, 2026
Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center
New York City, New York – USA
Parlando, Ian Niederhoffer, conductor.
Georg Friedrich HAAS: in vain

Ben Gambuzza | 25 FEB 2026

The hall was dark. I heard the clacking of train tracks. I remembered the old bike path, the one that traced the railroad along the river. And the place I used to stop off at when I biked there, a rock. I sat on it and stared at the waterfall, and beyond it, the old paper mill. Somewhere around this stretch of trail was the crash. When I was maybe thirteen, my friend’s spokes got caught in mine, and we flew over our handlebars. The diner across the street, the package store, and the old train station clock that used to work. Then a flash of white strobe light. And I opened my eyes.

The clacking was just sticks on a cymbal, and the light was one of many that momentarily splashed Parlando chamber orchestra as they played Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain. An hour-long work that the composer wrote in 2000 as a protest to the 1999 electoral victories of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, the piece is terrifying—aurally, visually, spiritually. Some of it is played in complete darkness; some of it is played under red or blue (or both) stage lights that denote, respectively, the equal and just tuning systems between which the music alternates. This exploration of the Manichaean struggle between light and dark, good and evil—made even more startling by the fact that Haas’s parents were enthusiastic members of the Nazi Party—stirs up an acute anxiety in the listener’s gut. It also plunged my seatmate and me into strange, distant childhood memories. As the audience applauded, you could feel the disquiet in the crowd. Parlando’s ovations are typically exuberant; this one was—I don’t know how else to say it—stuck.

In his preconcert remarks, an integral and beloved part of the ensemble’s performances, Parlando’s founder and conductor Ian Niederhoffer told the audience that in vain asks the question, “What can you do?” He means in the face of injustice. Like Haas, he suggested, many Americans, because of the actions of the current presidential administration, are coming to terms with the fact that history is not a linear progression of things always getting better. History is a “pendulum,” he says (with Hegel and Marx). Likewise, Haas’s music doesn’t proceed like a story. Instead, Niederhoffer said, it proceeds in “historical time.” The composition “musicalizes” the swing of history from dark periods to bright periods (assuming either exists; don’t think too much about the essentialism). If Beethoven’s 9th endures two-hundred years on as a paean to liberté, égalité, and fraternité, in vain remains relevant a quarter-century after its creation as a lament for the failure of those very ideals.

As my seatmate, hardly an inveterate listener of classical music, remarked, in vain doesn’t give the listener much to hold onto. Especially because there’s no straightforward narrative. And it eschews melody for pure texture, threading that texture with microtones and tuning anarchy. It begins with a carnivalesque, trippy tangle of sighing glissandi throughout the orchestra—a dizzying effect that felt like listening to a cassette rewinding through a kaleidoscope (if such a thing were possible). As the lights dimmed and darkness overtook the room, individual instruments swelled—horns blasted, and a spotlit Kristi Shade furiously plucked her harp with even more glissandi. The faintest veneer of high strings, like something out of Mahler’s 9th, offered a brief moment of healing before the regular stage lights came on and a clarinet let out a piercing long note with no vibrato that cut right to my brain stem.

The ensemble seemed to come slightly apart when they had light to see each other. But the unpredictable soup of dissonance was so dense, the darkness had such a unifying effect on my experience of the sound, that I may have been misperceiving. It’s easier to hear the music coalesce when you can’t see the individual players. Still, the shaded portions were my favorite. But one balm in particular, now under blue light, was a series of regular old major-key arpeggios that the horns (Jasmine Lavariega and Noah Fotis) pronounced like decrees. A relic from a past musical style; a salute to Bruckner, maybe? The blue turned to red, and an evil accordion (played by Shawn Gough) and emergency alarm sounds in the winds ferried us back to the beginning, where more cascading glisses awaited us, the pendulum of history swinging back.

Georg Friedrich Haas in 2014 (credit: Gian Marco Castelberg)

in vain is tragic. Haas himself has acknowledged that the ending, which takes us back to the beginning, is anything but optimistic: “I still cannot imagine that anybody can perceive the moment when the music from the beginning returns at the end as anything but oppressive.” Parlando leaned into these final moments with strung-out and exhausted descending scales. They get slower and slower, minute by minute. As the red light seeped into the blue, I had to tell my brain not to render the glockenspiel’s descending sequence as a grotesque “Three Blind Mice.” But it wouldn’t listen. As darkness fell for the last time, gongs thundered, and strobe lights flashed. The sound of Parlando seemed to get heavier. The light slowly returned. Scales. Slowing. Still. It’s almost as if Haas was mirroring the sham of Western idealism by breaking down one of the most elemental units of European music (the scale) like an organ eroding from some horrible degenerative disease.

What about Niederhoffer’s question: What can you do? We may have to ask a different question: What does the music get us to do? Like all concert music, in vain is capable of prompting a revolution in the mind rather than in the street. And like a Bach Passion, it’s music for reflection, not for celebration. It conceptualizes a fallen utopian idea. It’s an obituary in music. There was something healthily naive about Parlando’s interpretation, but for such a young ensemble, their sound was mature. Was there something naive about my own imagination? Why did I remember, of all things, the rail trail in my hometown? Maybe memory, true or false, is its own utopia. ■

EXTERNAL LINKS:

Parlando: parlandonyc.org
Ian Niederhoffer: ianniederhoffer.com
Georg Friedrich Haas: brahms.ircam.fr/en/composer/georg-friedrich-haas/

About the author:

Ben Gambuzza is a writer, pianist, book editor, and researcher living in Brooklyn, New York. He is also the host of The Best Is Noise, a live classical music show on Radio Free Brooklyn.

Read more by Ben Gambuzza.