Customer Reviews

Beat Furrer: Nuun; Presto con fuoco; Still; Poemas

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This is the second CD of Furrer's work that I've become familiar with. While I'm still enjoying it, I'm beginning to wonder if his musical world is more circumscribed than I had thought originally. It is all very busy music, verging on frenetic, with often obvious organizing principles. In some cases, I'm less sure that it wraps around a really solid core.

'Nuun' for two pianos and small orchestra is the largest work in the collection. It begins with a boldly-stated B-flat, surrounded by considerable activity. The starting pitch works as something of a pedal tone, gradually working its way upward chromatically over the course of the piece. Most of the material has some ascending character, whether as rapid passagework or in a more gradual manner. This kinetic business eventually gives way to a contrasting section--very quiet but still busy--in which the ascending theme is not evident. This passes on to activity again, with the music finally reaching the opening B-flat, finally topping out at B.

'Still' is a smaller piece, but brings to mind much of the piano writing in 'Spur', available on another album. 'Poemas' for voice and very small ensemble (featuring prominent guitar) is a dramatic setting of Neruda. Instrumental writing is sparse, with the voice quite forward. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Laurence gives a confident and expressive reading of the seven songs, with both the necessary drama and intimacy.

To my ear, the real treat is 'Presto con fuoco' for flute and piano. The piano initially acts as a sort of metronome, with the flute playing short, rapid (and very quiet) ornaments around it. It grows from there, never losing energy. This would be a dandy piece to close out a concert.

Beat Furrer is a wonderful orchestrator purveyor of timbre,effects/affects anytime anyplace,musical structure of conventional wisdom is also quite clear' he has a marvelously developed sense of rhythmic crossings,diagonals and interlacings, configurations, tosssed hither thether and yon,as in the NUUN; Two pianos and orchestra,He also marshalls here wonderful performers the two pianists, Marino Formenti, and Florian Mueller, also the more playful yet serious sensibility of conductor Peter Eotvos makes for exciting music making at its highest most relevant. But the creative language here relies heavily on tried and tested formulaic gestures, and you come to feel the baggage of the old.It would be premissable if Furrer ventured into his own arrogance, relying on an attitude,a sensibiliy,but the materilas come to dominate his subjectivity.Time has developed so quickly now that materials are assimilated and tossed on the scrapheap of history or to be utilized to try to coax to summon a voice out of it, like lighting the neck electrodes to give life to the misunderstood monster, modernity I guess. I can see Furrer utilizing rhythm in and of itself quite in an original manner as a focus with barbaric Stravinsky like repetitions thrown in. It is all suggestive, the result is to actually simply suggest this arduous modernist vocabulary and move on with your own arrogance as a creator that is interesting;Magnus Lindberg is another example within this mileau of trying to break free from the avant-garde pallette,negotiate in and around it the timbral lingua franca, fast and furious alienations schemes,with then quasi-misterioso passages to allow the music to breath within its own concocted tyrannical space.He as well doesn't quite break free all the time into his own sensibility rendering his own voice.Yet it is there nonetheless.
There is nothing quite free in Furrer either,a comfort zone proclaimed as Lacan might say; he keeps his music materials tightly on a leash,and he proves to get marvelously polished results. I enjoyed the Flute and piano work much more, an unassuming work, quite private but not overly so of rhythms primarily the lower more percussive registers of the piano,incessantly deployed suggesting another instrument,and this then is tossed with slap key quite interesting effects of the flute. But we have heard all this before, music must continue,as Adorno might say someplace,keep going with creation is what brings the ethical dimension to composition despite all its incessant hardships in competing with the mindlessness of the music markets. "Still" with the Klanforum Wien,spit-clean playing and a group Furrer founded and played in for a time is another matter; this is good avant-gardy stuff again but we seem to not mind it,the forces under another applicable sensibility for this music conductor Sylvain Cambreling.I thought the focus on the trumpets a but to much of the "shock" value overdetermined,again as in Stravinsky, "shock" as in cinema fills up spaces quickly displacing content and useful narrative.Another tried and tested language of gestures.
I found the "Poemas" uninteresting,if mysterious again much pointillism with a rarefied beauty of short gentle ginger tremoli in the piano and the, too much vibrato in the female voice in this repertoire turns me off as well, still there was sensuous moments. Great accompaniment, Furrer doesn't allow the instrumental accompaniment to give full force. The guitar as accompaniment works very well with Furrer's predictable musical language, gives or renders more an earthy quality to what is rather cold and abstract.