Hyena

Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas has become one of the most provocative and important voices in contemporary music. As a composer, he often bring his life and his family into his work. HYENA is a concerto for orchestra and narrator, featuring a remarkable score to accompany the autobiographical story told by his American wife, the writer and storyteller Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. She was an alcoholic for years and wrote a searing story about her long journey to sobriety.  In concert, Williams-Haas reads her story, as the music reinforces her narrative’s hallucinatory qualities. HYENA will be performed by Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means. The hyena is Mollena Lee Williams-Haas’s inner demon, which encouraged her to drink and with which she is now settling scores once and for all. It is a lavish and gorgeous treatment of light, color, words, and performance.

This performance of HYENA is a coproduction of the Boston University Center for New Music and the ICA/Boston.