Beat Furrer is the focus of this year’s “Dialogues” festival in Salzburg, which presents an extensive composer portrait with ensemble and vocal music. Golda Schultz and Mike Svoboda give the premiere of spazio immergente (immeasurable space) for soprano and trombone.

A dialogue between trombone and soprano carries a text of visionary breadth into various acoustic spaces – with voice, speech, breath. The basis for Beat Furrer’s spazio immergente for soprano and trombone are Lucretius’s astonishing reflections on the phenomena and nature of being which he wrote in elaborate metre in his treatise De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) in the first century BC. 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 in different spaces. A densely-woven intertwining of various dynamic processes at the beginning, modulating tonal colours and voice-like colourations in the trombone produce a virtuoso polyphony. The five sections are sung in Latin, except for the fourth where the text suddenly accquires a special sense of the present in German, quasi-spoken by both the performers: “... so that the walls of the universe do not suddenly disappear into immeasurable emptiness like flames ... and nothing, no remnant remains – deserted space.”

Marie Luise Maintz
(from: [t]akte 2 / 2015]