Following the success of his new opera „Violetter Schnee“ at the Berlin Staatsoper, Beat Furrer has new projects in sight.

„Spazio immergente“ translates as „Immeasurable space“. Beat Furrer has already set a text of visionary breadth several times from Lucretius’s treatise De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), a work which contains astonishing reflections on the phenomena and nature of being. One of these passages also became the central point of reference of his last opera Violetter Schnee: „... so that the walls of the universe do not suddenly disappear into immeasurable emptiness like flames ... and nothing, no remnant remains – deserted space.“

The eight verses contain nothing less than a vision of dissolution and apocalypse, and form the starting point for Beat Furrer for a tonal unfolding into different spaces. His new work Spazio immergente III for soprano, trombone and strings translates the first version into a larger orchestral context. The first version interleaved the two voices, soprano and trombone and carried the text into different sonorous spaces – with voice, language, breath. Through a densely-woven intertwining of various dynamic processes at the beginning, modulating tonal colours and voice-like colourations in the trombone, a virtuoso polyphony is created. In the fourth of five sections, otherwise all sung in Latin, the text suddenly switches to German, accquiring a special sense of the present, quasi-spoken by both the performers. The divided string colours translate harmonic structures, a model of movement and the tonal textures of the two solo parts and intensify them.

 Marie Luise Maintz
(from “[t]akte” 1/2019)