After his piano concerto attracted a lot of attention in Cologne, Paris and Munich, described by Gerhard Rohde as “a dramatic, exciting, almost uncannily enigmatic ‘double’”, Beat Furrer has been working on several compositions and a new music theatre piece. In lotófagos II he has developed his explorations into spatial acoustics further in collaboration with IRCAM in Paris, and at the same time has been writing a piece on forgetting. FAMA, his sound theatre piece about the resonance of memories and stories, will be performed at the Salzburg Festival and for the first time in Berlin.

Die Lotosfresser [The lotus eaters] – lotófagos – was the name given by Beat Furrer to his composition for soprano and double bass in 2007. The work is about a state of amnesia, in allusion to Odysseus’s consorts who ate lotuses in order to forget. As José Angel Valente put it: “We were in a desert, surrounded by our own image which we no longer recognised. We had lost our memory ...”. The theme is the slipping into “another” state which can be described in many different ways – as strange, oblivion, desert, death. In lotófagos II for two sopranos, instruments and electronics, which Beat Furrer composed for the Paris festival “agora” in June 2008, the work is also concerned with memory. One of the particular tonal phenomena which Beat Furrer uses here was created with IRCAM in Paris. Various sound laboratories have been working on “Wave Field Synthesis”, a new type of quasi-holographic exposure to sonic waves which permits an unbroken flexible, three-dimensional depiction of sounds in space. Beat Furrer’s lotófagos II is amongst the very first larger-scale compositions which exploit this technique. Alongside other works, Furrer is working on his next major project, the music theatre piece Wüstenbuch (Desert Book). Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, it will be premiered in March 2010 at Maerz Musik Berlin in collaboration with the Basel Theater the Wiener Festwochen and Festival d’Automne Paris.
Marie Luise Maintz
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
( from: takte 1/2008)