In Vain

Ergon Ensemble, the successful Greek ensemble specializing on contemporary music, will play for the fourth time at the Onassis Stegi. This time it will present Georg Friedrich Haas’s pioneer work “In Vain” (2000). This mesmerizing work by a leading exponent of spectral music, takes the audience through a journey from light to darkness and then back to light, bringing to the fore all those unfamiliar moments hiding in the shadows of traditional listening.

Having chosen quite a different path from that of modernist Avant Garde, through this work the Austrian composer tries to ‘articulate emotions and states of the soul, so that people can embrace them as if they were their own’. Even lighting is used in “In Vain” in order to create a holistic musical experience for the audience. Committed to accurate interpretations of musical works, Ergon Ensemble is faced with the challenge of performing the work without a score, offering to the public an encounter with an astonishing ‘landscape’. The sense of hearing is sharpened in order to capture the way the work is constructed, bringing to mind the impossible, just as it appears in the works by the great visual artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972).