The Donaueschingen Festival and Wien modern offer an exceptionally wide-ranging insight into Beat Furrer’s latest works: four premieres, two Austrian first performances, the complete string quartets with the Quatuor Diotima and Furrer’s debut at the podium of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra form an impressive focus.

Receiving their premieres are his cycle of four orchestral studies “Tableaux”, the String Quartet no. 4, the vocal miniatures “Akusmata” and “Studie II” for piano. Besides this, his Violin Concerto of 2020 and all the string quartets are being performed. His new works are all explorations of the emergence of melody, in tonally and harmonically densely-conceptualized structures and compellingly developing formal progressions.
“Akusmata” is the name of seven sayings after Pythagoras; a vocal ensemble transforms the enigmatic sentences into concentrated sound.

Beat Furrer’s “Tableaux” is concerned with deep impacts, with layering and the finest natural and irregular voices emanating from this. They are inspired by early paintings by Max Ernst dating from around 1927; some of them are entitled “Wald und Sonne” in which monolithic configurations of vertically-towering trees can be seen. On closer examination, these branch out into fine structures and are peopled by living creatures. As in a series of paintings, in his four orchestral studies Beat Furrer explores specific musical textures between quasi mechanical, unique “speaking” events which open out. “The structures result from particular movements or are produced from physical pressure (frottage/grattage) and are brought to life at various levels in the background. In Max Ernst’s forest pictures it is extinct, vertical structures and a kind of blazing sun, a sort of Nature morte, full of life or living creatures. There are constant transformations of the sound in all four pieces, a movement which constantly occurs from below to above in various harmonic constellations. Behind this there is another level: voices which cry, shout, whisper, talk or sing. Behind the regular structure there are unstable, irregular phenomena.”

Beat Furrer