Word seems to be getting out, although I haven't seen an official announcement: Georg Friedrich Haas, one of the leading European composers of his or any generation, will begin teaching at Columbia University during the 2012-13 academic year, assuming the post previously held by Tristan Murail. An independent thinker with a profound knowledge of the American experimental tradition, Haas promises to be a rich addition to New York musical life. Perhaps some local outfit will dare to stage his harrowing, eerily beautiful opera Bluthaus, which Shirley Apthorp described as "arguably the most deft reflection on post-traumatic stress since Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia." I wrote about Haas in 2010.
