After composing several works for piano solo, piano and ensemble and a piano concerto, Beat Furrer continues his interaction with the instrument and has composed a second piano concerto. This will be premiered in September in Geneva.

Almost twenty years after his first piano concerto, Beat Furrer has again explored the concertante interplay of piano and orchestra. In his new work for the Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi he investigates the varied possibilities of exploring, transforming, embedding or juxtaposing the piano sound in the orchestra.

The Piano Concerto no. 2 is one of a series of piano works which influence each compositional process in their development and inspire Furrer to completely different sonorities and possibilities of articulation. In earlier works such as “nuun” for two pianos and ensemble (1995/96), “still” for ensemble (1998) and the piano quartet “spur” (1998), the sound of the piano is integrated in each case into the ensemble sound – almost as a point of flight or the focus of these densely-woven textures. In the First Piano Concerto, premiered in 2007 by Nicolas Hodges and the WDR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Rundel, the solo instrument begins to free itself, but is still closely allied with a second piano, the ensemble piano. “My primary objective”, says Beat Furrer, “was to give the piano a resonance throughout the whole piece and to preserve the plasticity of the piano sound. It always remains the centre of gravity, and the orchestra is the amplifier which gives the piano a space.” The “Studies for Piano Solo” (2011–25) composed over the last few years finally find their continuation in Piano Concerto no. 2.

Beat Furrer summarises the essence of his new Piano Concerto as follows: “The Second Concerto begins with fast repetitions of small chromatic clusters which become breathless speaking figures through continual alterations and are completely neutralized in pounding, widely spaced, non-homogeneous orchestral sounds. The resonating space which the orchestra opens up to the piano changes abruptly: it either reinforces the sounds of the piano or confronts the piano in dialogue passages. It was important to me to keep the relationship of the solo instrument to the orchestra in constant motion, to increase or reduce the resonating space in order to create changing perspectives on the sound of the piano through constantly transforming harmonic relationships. Right in the very deep registers of the piano, spectra can thereby be supported, or strengthened and transformed.”

Tessa Singer
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson – from [t]akte 1/2025)