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Beat Furrer Featured at Moving Sounds Festival 2009 With Performances by Argento Chamber Ensemble, TimeTable Percussion Trio and the JACK Quartet

Sep. 15, 2009

On September 12, 13 and 14, The Austrian Cultural Forum, Le Poisson Rouge, the Music Information Center of Austria and the Argento New Music Project presented the Moving Sounds Festival 2009, celebrating three days of Austrian music at multiple venues across New York City. Featured among the festival's events was the world premiere of Beat Furrer's work for narrator and 20-person chamber orchestra Xenos II, performed by the Argento Chamber Ensemble and featuring the composer himself in the narrator's role. Other performances of the music of Beat Furrer throughout the three day festival included the US premiere of Scene VI from his recent opera, Fama, by the Argento Chamber Ensemble, Music for Mallets, by TimeTable Percussion Trio, Aria, by Argento, and a performance by the JACK Quartet of his String Quartet No. 3. Allan Kozinn of The New York Times had this to say on the premiere of Xenos II:

[Xenos II] explored color and dynamics in two mirror-image movements. In the first, gentle pointillistic timbres are eerily woven around a spoken German text. Mr. Furrer, as his own narrator, spoke in short bursts, often in single, uninflected words. The words and notes seemed to hang in the air at times, and to dissolve quickly elsewhere, creating an effect that became more ethereal as the work unfolded.

The textless second movement was the opposite in every way. The graceful, otherworldly sounds on which the first movement was built gave way to sharply articulated, dissonantly blaring woodwind and brass chords, and eventually to a mechanistic passage that combined rumbling low notes and a steady, searing high pitch.

The Moving Sounds Festival 2009 was a monumental event for contemporary Austrian music. In addition to the music of Furrer, the festival also included a performance of Georg Friedrich Haas' Ein Schattenspiel for solo piano and live electronics and performances by Austrian DJs Christopher Just, Dorian Concept, and dieb13.

For more on the Argento New Music Project, visit www.argentonewmusic.org.

Learn more on the music of Beat Furrer at www.universaledition.com and www.baerenreiter.com.

Beat Furrer
Xenos II (2009)
for narrator and 20-person chamber orchestra

Music for Mallets (1985)
xylorimba, marimba and vibraphone
11'

Fama, Scene VI (2004)
for voice and contrabass flute
10'

Aria (1999)
clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola and violoncello
18'

String Quartet No. 3 (2004)
40‘

Georg Friedrich Haas
Ein Schattenspiel (2004)
for piano and live electronics
10'

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