HAAS at Club Passim

Last night, Wednesday, October 28, 2026, Natalie Haas (cello) and Brittany Haas (fiddle) played a sold out show at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As the duo HAAS, the sisters have released two albums that are available at bandcamp.com: HAAS, released May 26, 2023; and North Node, released June 19, 2026. The sheet music for the album HAAS, “charts of all the original tunes on the album, with the melody and the chords,” is also available through the album’s page on Bandcamp.

Natalie is the older sister; both musicians have lived in the Boston area but not at the same time, and each has performed multiple times at Club Passim.

The sisters opened with “Free Space/Reel for Dennis”, the first track from their first album HAAS.

They continued by playing all but one of the tunes from their new album, North Node, as an album release show, playing the tunes in album order.

The first tune from the new album, an Irish slip jig, is “Swan Carnival,” which quotes from “The Swan” from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. Natalie commented that “The Swan” is the best-known piece for cello after the prelude to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007.

The next medley, “Cedar Pass/Peanut Peak/Prairie Chicken,” was written by Brittany Haas during a retreat in the Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

The set continued with “Ice Box/Corybantic,” written in the Phrygian mode, an unusual diatonic mode. “Corybantic” refers to the Korybantes, “armed and crested dancers who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing.” When the tune was over, Natalie said, “That was enough G flats to last a lifetime.”

The duo played “Water Droplets”, a piece written for violin and cello by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius at age fourteen, followed by “Groundhog Hotel,” “Prairie Dog Town/Jump Yip,” and “Nature Corridor/Excessive Vegetation” from the album. (Brittany mentioned that a jump yip “is a thing prairie dogs do to signify that danger has passed.”)

In a brief turn to baroque music, Brittany and Natalie played two Bach inventions, No. 6 BWV 777 in E major and No. 13 BWV 784 in A minor, where the left hand of the keyboard music was played on the cello and the right hand on the fiddle.

Returning to their album, the sisters played “Glacial Erratics,” “Box of Darkness,” and “The Noah Polska,” which was dedicated to Noah Altschuler, who took the photos for the North Node album. They continued with “Marian of Allendale,” a strathspey and jig written by Natalie, and “The Lone Juniper” by Brittany.

Duncan Wickel joined Natalie and Brittany on stage to play cello on the tune “The Sisters,” written by Darol Anger. Duncan stepped off the stage while Natalie and Brittany played “Turn Down the Bed,” a slow air. Duncan returned for a final set of traditional tunes, an Ozark tune named “Dry and Dusty” and a Kentucky tune, “Duck River,” of which I found a video on YouTube from 2007 with Brittany Haas on fiddle.

The audience called Natalie and Brittany back for one final tune, “Finally,” the last track from HAAS.

That was a great show. I spent a lot of time watching Natalie Haas play cello, and I noted that much (but not all) of the music was played in first position; in my cello lessons, I am just beginning to learn second position and extended first position.