“This piece must be performed in complete darkness. No music stand lamps and no emergency lighting. The instrumentalists are positioned in the four corners of the room.”

With this command, Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas plunges into the mysterious darkness of his String Quartet No. 3, eliminating the audience’s visual relationship to the performers and the space in order to stimulate the aural imagination. As the musicians unleash ghostly microtones and chords, Webern-like melodies and a quotation from Renaissance master Carlo Gesualdo shine out like beacons. In Sheafer Lab Theater, the JACK Quartet offers its “mind-blowingly good” (LA Times) rendition of this exceptional contemporary work.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS: String Quartet No. 3, In iij. Noct.