Photo: Brian Slater
'Huddersfield's Town Hall has seen some impressive, colossal performances at HCMF over the years, but I'm not sure anything has rendered me so speechless, so overwhelmed and so enraptured as this piece.
I was conscious of the fact that there were performers all over the stage, and possibly in the balconies too, but i realised within even the first ten seconds that keeping my eyes open – always a temptation in ambitious, visually unusual works like this – was going to be a complete distraction.'
5against4 online blog
‘One of the major events of HCMF… an immersion in a way of being in the world – musical and social, political and emotional – that feels astoundingly contemporary…’
Tom Service, The New Music Show, BBC Radio 3
'Not often is Georg Friedrich Haas upstaged in avant-garde circles, but discussion of his latest epic must wait a few paragraphs. Three hours earlier, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival had heard the knockout premiere of an extraordinary piece written nearly 30 years ago
I sense the piece is part elegy, part protest at ecological destruction and political cynicism. Either way, I will be searching out the recording (Another Timbre) made by these excellent performers — the Octandre Ensemble directed by Christian Mason and Jon Hargreaves'
The Times
Photo: Brian Slater
