Search - Beat Furrer, Klangforum Wien, Julie Moffat :: Beat Furrer: Narcissus

Shards of music, splinters of text - and it does elicit a ce

Discophage | France | 04/18/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"For sake of clarity I prefer to call "repetitive music" the music written by Glass, Reich, Riley, Adams and the likes (a "school" which seems to have attracted some following in the UK and much of it in the Netherlands), and reserve the term "minimalism" to a widely different trend whose most famous proponents would be Morton Feldman in the US, Giacinto Scelsi, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino in Europe. The first branch is music that is, indeed, based on the repetition of basic and possibly "minimal" cells, often with simple, tonal and even saccharine harmonic progressions, but which by process of accumulation can be orchestrally very lush and thick and all but "minimalistic".



Conversely the "true" minimalists concentrate on the properties of single sounds, stage very few, rare and sparse musical events, often at the threshold of silence, compelling the listener to really LISTEN. Although I've found some pleasure in some repetitive music (see for instance my review of the piano music of Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, Simeon ten Holt: Complete Multiple Piano Works [Box Set]), I generally find much more nourishment in the (in my own definition) "minimalists".



Beat Furrer's Narcissus is minimalist music. Furrer was born in Switzerland in 1954 but established in Austria in 1975 and became an Austrian citizen. He is a founder of the Ensemble Klangforum Wien, one of Europe's leading contemporary music ensembles.



Furrer calls Narcissus an opera, and it was indeed premiered at the Graz opera (Austria) in 1994, but to consider it as one requires a big stretch of the imagination (and must have required one by the stage director back then). It would more appropriately be called a cantata, or a scenic cantata if it really needs to be staged (but it doesn't obviously call for staging, much less than, say, a Bach Cantata, although even Bach Cantatas can be and have been staged). Furrer follows the path paved by the radical avant-garde of the sixties and seventies (Nono and Berio come to mind) by rejecting any sense of traditional narrative and conflict between characters that is so integral to the history and perhaps nature of the genre, turning it instead into something like an opera of sounds. "Where the traditional operatic hero is based on the unity of person and language, in my Narcissus the permanent search for this language becomes thematic" writes the composer. Vocally, Narcissus is scored for two speakers, chorus and, in its sixth and final scene, a trio of one live mezzo and two pre-recorded ones.



What Furrer does is take excerpts from Ovid's Narcissus story in Metamorphoses, in a German translation, reduces each word to its component syllables, and alternates these between the two speakers. What is left are splintered phonemes (nothing you would understand without reading the text), supported by likewise short and fragmented eruptions of music from the instrumental ensemble, often treated soloistically. Those scenes (I, III and V) alternate with scenes for chorus and ensemble (text in Latin here), straighter in their approach to text but still very minimal and hushed. Final Scene (VI) has the same text as spoken in German by the two speakers in scenes III and V, but here in Latin, shared in shards between live mezzo and two pre-recorded tapes with what the liner notes say is mezzo but sounds to me more like soprano (and, yes, Julie Moffat IS a soprano); later in the movement the same happens with the chorus.



Does that description seem attractive? Possibly not, and this is certainly not music for everybody. But if you like the music of Lachenmann and Sciarrino this is definitely for you, and indeed I find that it does elicit a certain fascination. Because they are rarefied, mostly hushed and often surprising, the musical events catch the ear - like whiffs of music flying by from the netherworld. I can't say that the piece is very dramatic, and that it stages a trajectory of tension and repose, as an opera (even an opera of sounds) does. The fact that no English translation of the sung texts is provided won't help either the concentration of the listener not familiar with either German or Latin. There is not much difference of character between the three scenes for speakers, and likewise between those for chorus, as if Furrer had found a gig and was content just to milk it - and some of those scenes are quite long, too: 16:43 of phonemes for Scene V, respectively 12:21 and 13:17 of slow-moving chorus in Scenes II & IV, almost 10-minutes of ritualistic mezzo and soprano in Scene VI before a big orchestral interjection. There are many jagged outbursts of instrumental violence especially in the speakers' scenes, but they happen as spurts, really. Overall the music is contemplative and slow-moving - more even in the chorus scenes than in the speakers' scenes. In the finale again the music is slow-moving, rarefied, mysterious, ritualistic and quite lyrical in its own peculiar way. It reminds me of Nono's Prometeo.



TT 77:21. Liner notes by Furrer himself, not entirely helpful and needlessly highbrowed with their references to Adorno, Lacan and Beckett. I am not sure I hear through the stereo recording all the interplay with the two tapes that Furrer speaks about in his notes: here the experience in real space is amiss.



Narcissus dates from 1994 and was Furrer's second opera (or what he calls such) after Die Blinden (after a play by Maeterlinck, the author of Pelleas et Mélisande, Die Blinden) from 1989. Since then he's composed three more: Begehren (2001, Beat Furrer: Begehren), Invocation (2003), and Fama (2005, Beat Furrer: Fama [Hybrid SACD]), which Furrer, with probably more candidness, calls "Hörtheatre", "Theatre for hearing". I've already ordered Die Blinden and will pursue my exploration of this interesting and original composer, to hear how his style developed to and from Narcissus.

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