Festival Sankt Gallen:Composer portrait Beat Furrer

Beat Furrer was born in 1954 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland; he has lived in Vienna since 1975. Austria has become his musical home – as one beautifully puts it in English, he is a "naturalized" Austrian.

He studied composition with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. Over the years, a friendship developed between the two, artists belonging to two different generations. Furrer also took conducting courses with Otmar Suitner and has embarked on a successful conducting career, focusing on contemporary music. Among other things, he advocated for the works of Haubenstock-Ramati and conducted the world premiere of the revised version of his opera Amerika in 1992.

In 1985, Furrer founded the Ensemble Klangforum Wien, which he led for many years as artistic director and conductor. He and his successors have developed Klangforum into one of the world's best ensembles for new music.

Between the early 1980s and 1995, Beat Furrer's compositions were managed by Universal Edition: two of his operas (Die Blinden, 1989 and Narcissus, 1994), orchestral works (Chiaroscuro, 1983/1986), Risonanze, 1988, Face de la chaleur, 1991, Madrigal, 1992 and others), pieces for ensemble (A un moment de terre perdu, 1990, Narcissus-Fragment, 1993, Nuun, 1995/1996, etc.), chamber music (two string quartets, a piano trio, a clarinet trio, among others), as well as works for solo piano and violoncello. His work Nachtigall for violoncello from 1982 is the first on the list of his compositions; it was also the first piece he entrusted to UE.

For Furrer, composing has always been a struggle with the material, and he is rarely satisfied with the finished score: it often represents the first version among several revisions.

The music he wrote in the 80s and 90s was mostly fragile, with dynamics primarily in the piano range, the sound repeatedly shaped by extended techniques beyond the traditional. However, dramatic moments were not absent from his palette of expression: the 1st String Quartet (1984) features an unexpected, aggressive eruption, while in the ensemble piece In der Stille des Hauses wohnt ein Ton (1987), the string tremolos and fluttertongued notes are abruptly interrupted by an infernal storm.

Furrer's music suggests rather than daring to make clear statements. He does not necessarily set texts to convey content – in his Narcissus-Fragment, for example, the two soloists produce syllables instead of complete words, as if in a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to communicate.

One could describe Furrer's compositions as "concept music": each new work is based on a new concept. For the composer, the search for new and flexible systems is what counts. He says: "For each piece, I want to recreate the material and the relationships of the intervals anew. Composing would no longer interest me if I felt I were reproducing a tested concept rather than taking a step further. Certainly, some pieces are closely connected by continuing the same ideas, but they always appear in a completely new light."

However, Furrer never rigidly adheres to a concept on which he is about to base a new piece: "A pre-designed concept leads to new frictions with it at every phase of a composition. Therefore, I constantly explore the relationship between formal concepts and the subjective need for expression to change or even break the concept. I do not slavishly follow it, but retain the freedom of decision at every moment. Thus, the breaks in a concept become almost more important than the concept itself, as they may lead me to a region I would not have otherwise encountered."

The visual arts serve as a source of inspiration for Furrer, similar to many of his colleagues. Nuun, for example, for two pianos and ensemble, was created under the stimulating impression of the monochrome paintings of Yves Klein. The richness of detail in these paintings cannot be guessed at first glance, just as with Nuun, where the numerous sonic events complicate the perception of movements in the music and their structures upon first listening. As the music progresses, the layers are removed one by one, with their energy remaining in the background, ready to resurface at any moment. For Furrer, his work as a composer partly represents the realization of different layers of energy.