hyena

The Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas composed the remarkable music accompanying 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, which she reads at this concert. The music reinforces the narrative’s hallucinatory qualities. HYENA is a concerto for orchestra and narrator, with the role of the orchestra being fulfilled by the unsurpassed Viennese ensemble for contemporary music, klangforum Wien, with the Dutch conductor Bas Wiegers. The hyena is Mollena Lee Williams-Haas’s inner demon, which encouraged her to drink and which she is now settling scores with for once and for all.