Graz University of the Arts

Portrait of the composer Beat Furrer on his 70th birthday

Beat Furrer, long-time composition professor at the KUG, celebrates his 70th birthday this year

(Bild: Manu Theobald)

"In portrait": The vocal ensemble Cantando Admont and instrumental students from the Graz University of the Arts presented works by Beat Furrer, born in Switzerland in 1954, at the Theater im Palais in Graz.

These dripping sounds - are they just shadows of a lonely voice? Or do we hear a dialog between unequal partners? In "Spazio immergente", a trombone and a soprano meet in a 2000-year-old poem by Lucretius. A "perpetual space" between time, which often becomes the setting for this evening.

The Graz University of the Arts, where Beat Furrer was a professor of composition for many years, has invited guests to the Theater im Palais, where instrumental students will perform a portrait concert of the composer with the Cantando Admont vocal ensemble. Supplemented by late medieval vocal pieces, the concert explores the oeuvre of the Austrian composer, who was born in 1954.

Poems set to music full of secrets
From the glassy, fragile "Cold and Calm and moving" (1992) to "Akusmata" (2020), Furrer's settings of European poetry by Pythagoras, Petrarch and Dino Campana create highly individual, enigmatic worlds of expression.

The "Canti della tenebra" for piano and alto voice, for example, show just how directly emotional Furrer's work is despite its enigmatic nature: a feverish rumbling of the keys, which pianist Maria Iaiza subtly depicts in its threatening, disembodied presence, forms the basis of a haunting invocation by Cornelia Sonnleithner's voice. A sound, completely present beyond time.