Beat Furrer’s song cycle “Canti della tenebra” after Dino Campana receives its premiere at the Ultima Festival Oslo. strane costellazioni his new work for large orchestra has been composed for the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie.

Canti della tenebra

Dino Campana’s poem “Il canto della tenebra” (The song of darkness) speaks of “restless spirits” – spirits to which only darkness grants favour when the colours of the day have faded. It is not difficult to find synonyms for the poet’s own life: Dino Campana, born in 1885, was important in the circles of Italian futurism. He was the poet of the unrest which spread throughout Europe and as far as Argentina. His life spanned from incarceration in prisons and asylums in his youth to an intellectual freedom which he consciously refashioned in the musicality, clarity and wealth of colours found in his texts. In his Canti della tenebra Beat Furrer has composed settings of five of Campana’s highly-poetic texts from the book which brought the poet instant fame in 1914. His Canti orfici are the document of a life’s journey which ended after fourteen years in the mental home of Castel Pulci near Florence in 1932. For Beat Furrer, Campana is “the archetype of an artistic destiny in the early 20th century and a pathos of squandering himself on the world, to which society immediately responds through the most varied measures of reintegration into society in the asylum or prison. Dino Campana was perhaps the first to give expression to the fact that there is no escape, that there is no longer a utopian America. His journey is no longer a winter’s journey into a strange, enchanting country. Rather, the secret lies in quite everyday phenomena, in the wind which he describes, in the water ...”

The texts lead into the orphic contemplation which Campana describes in possibly his most famous poem “La Chimera”: in the smile of a pale beauty which appears “out of the unknown distance”. Beat Furrer’s song compositions are conceived as a cycle, as the story of a journey in itself. They take as their starting point a fleeting night image by the river in “Sul torrente notturno”, and in “Viaggio a Montevideo” describe a true voyage with swinging chords. At the centre stands the nocturnal landscape of the “Canto della tenebra”, followed by the floating sound of speed of the “Corsa infrenabile”, a train journey through the Argentinian pampas, which represents with an act of liberation. Finally, in “La Chimera”, Campana celebrates this enigmatic foreignness, the strangeness; in Beat Furrer’s setting it seems to sink further and further, in a diatonically descending melody, without end.


The discovery of relativity

The premiere of Furrer’s strane costellazioni, his new work for large orchestra by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in Frankfurt is linked in the Festival der Alten Oper to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose notorious premiere has its centenary this year. For Beat Furrer cubism is a fundamental key to this anniversary work. “The discovery of relativity, of motion and of time lead to the polyfocussing of a cubist image. There is no longer one single vanishing point, but many. That is something which has inspired me to this form of strane costellazioni, the orchestral work for the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a new kind of assembly technique for me. This is carried out in the manner of a kaleidoscope of small-scale montages of intersecting structures, which can represent strongly contrasting forms of motion.”

Furrer has worked on such montages since his Studie für Klavier 2011, in which he used the technique in its original form, further developing it in the choral work Enigma V and in linea dell’orizzonte for Ensemble 2012. The composer explains his approach: “What interests me is the perspective on very different layers of the processual nature, the fact that these layers are both overlying as well as intersecting. In the composition for orchestra all this becomes much more complex, because it offers me the possibility of getting to grips with the orchestra in all its tonal richness from tutti to solo. I find time and time again the orchestral tutti to be a special challenge: to prevent it from all merging into a monotonous mass. I deal with this through what is a new form of intersecting technique for me, in which I handle the juxtaposition of solo and tutti sounds differently. Above all, I am interested in the intertwining of various temporalities, of tempi and movements, how the various speeds of processual alterations can exist alongside each other. This requires great precision in the intersections. Through this, various gestures can also exist alongside each other; everything should not merge under a gestural enveloping curve.”

Marie Luise Maintz
(from [t]akte 1/2013)