Beat Furrer was born in Schaffhausen in 1954 and received his first training (piano) at the music school there. After moving to Vienna in 1975, he studied conducting with Otmar Suitner and composition with Roman Haubenstock Ramati at the University of Music and Performing Arts. In 1985 he founded the Klangforum Wien, which he headed until 1992 and which he has been associated with as a conductor ever since. Commissioned by the Vienna State Opera, he wrote his first opera, “Die Blinden”, and his second opera, “Narcissus”, premiered in 1994 at the steirischer herbst at the Graz Opera. In 1996 he was composer in residence at the Lucerne Music Festival. In 2001 the music theater “Begehren” was premiered in Graz, in 2003 the opera “invocation” in Zurich and in 2005 the multi-award winning audio theater “FAMA” in Donaueschingen. Furrer has been full professor of composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz from 1991 to 2023. At the end of the 1990s, together with Ernst Kovacic, he founded “impuls” as an international ensemble and composer academy for contemporary music in Graz. From 2006 to 2009 he held a visiting professorship for composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt. In 2004 he received the Music Prize of the City of Vienna, and since 2005 he has been a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
In 2006 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for “FAMA”. In 2010, his music theater work “Wüstenbuch” premiered at the Theater Basel. In 2014 he received the great Austrian State Prize. His opera “la bianca notte / the bright night” based on texts by Dino Campana was premiered in Hamburg in May 2015.
Since the 1980s, Furrer has created a broad repertoire ranging from solo and chamber music to works ,for ensemble, choir, orchestra and opera. In January 2019, his new opera “Violetter Schnee” (Violet Snow), to a libretto by Händl Klaus and based on a template by Vladimir Sorokin, was premiered at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin.
In August 2024, he was awarded the Roche Commission as part of the Lucerne Festival. In 2025, the opera “Das grosse Feuer” (libretto by Thomas Stangl after the novel “Eisejuaz” by Sara Gallardo) received its world premiere at the Opernhaus Zürich. His second piano concerto was also premiered with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Jonathan Nott and Francesco Piemontesi as the soloist.
Beat Furrer received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2018, he is a member of the Board of Trustees for the New Music Network appointed by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.
NOTICE
(for piano and ensemble)
"Concerto for piano and ensemble" Beat Furrer is the extension and the culmination of his compositional study of the sounds of the piano, its phenomena, its resonances, its harmonic spectra, the use of pedals, previously explored in the works for solo piano like Phasma (2002) or DreiKlavierstücke (2004) and in Nuun for two pianos and ensemble (1995/1996). "My main goal was", says Beat Furrer, "to give the piano a resonance throughout the piece and maintain the plasticity of its sounds. These sounds are still the center of gravity of the piece while the orchestra plays the role of amplifier, giving an extended piano sound". Concerto for piano and ensemble sound spatialization using the piano as a compositional technique. The large ensemble is the echo chamber of the solo instrument, in which the different sounds and possibilities of articulation of the piano are amplified: from metal, shattering into crystal. Particular emphasis is given to the sounds and trembling tones of the low notes of the strings: the "non-tempered in the temperate" here is the starting point for the harmonic development. (...) Muted notes of the low keys of the solo piano acquire a resonance by the instruments of the orchestra and the sounds of Piccolo's second piano: they flow so to speak, from the solo instrument into the acoustic environmental space. Of these vibrations, Beat Furrer develops a rapid movement of sextuplets, which result in the complete device ever more dazzling cascades of piano solo. The early harmonic structures are transformed into rhythmic structures.
Le martellato (hammered) sets the sextuplets that turn more and more the whole expression of the event.
The result is a figure carried deeper into the suction of the motor movement. The increase corresponds to a dynamic expansion of the sound space, up to the high notes of the piano, accordion and trumpet, combined with a sound transformation. "The process leading to more and more metallic sound, high pitched, like a gong. It is interrupted by two lines gradually ascending, tones and resonances leading to the most acute that can be comparable to the sound of a woodblock. Thus began a process of modulation to the crystalline sounds. Glass bottles begin a descending line, the piano is also used. During these repeated periods in the high note regions, the martellato indicates a turning point to another sound, isolated, brutal." (...)
Marie-Louise Maintz
(translated from German by Aude Grandveau)
Nero su nero (black on black) speaks of gradations of darkness, of the nuancing of light, the application of colour without colour, the stratification of pigments, of intensification. A multiple fanned-out overlapping of voices, whose particles rest on quite elementary forms of movement is the colour material. In the composition two great sections composed of heterogeneous elements frame a slow central part which emerges as a great inexorable development leading to a bright, loud, frenetic blaze. A continuous intensification is pared from almost imperceptible alterations, which takes the action to a tremendous dramatic high point.
The structural model, says Beat Furrer, consists of a principle of assembly developed to the highest complexity and yet simplicity: “It is about the creation of melody from the interpolation of heterogeneous elements. In the first part these are two layers; a great colourfulness is created of these two structures interpolated into each other. In the central part there is just one layer. The very long central section is concerned with achieving a continuous alteration of colour instrumentally as well as harmonically – from darkness to light. Within this development there is nevertheless still a structural polyphony of various kinds of movement in the strings, at different speeds with the ascending and descending lines. The sequencing models are based on chromatic and other intervallic combinations which pass by superimposed in the tonal landscape, so that a kind of unending movement of wandering overtones is produced. In the last part the descending chromaticism in the strings is continued, as overtones of a chromatic line.”
Marie Luise Maintz
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. Is was premiered in September 2025 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 ntheir 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)