Beat Furrer

Beat Furrer is composer-in-residence at this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Born in Schaffhausen in Switzerland in 1954, he moved to Vienna in 1975 and began his musical career as a pianist in various Austrian ensembles. Parallel to this, he studied conducting with Otmar Suitner and composition with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati at the Vienna Academy of Music. He wrote the first composition that he considers fully valid in 1982: Frau Nachtigall, a 15-minute work for solo cello. Two years later, he won the Young Generation in Europe composition competition with his First String Quartet. In 1985, Furrer founded Klangforum Wien, which he led as Artistic Director until 1992 and with which he remains closely associated as a conductor. Since the premiere of his orchestral work Face de la chaleur, which was performed in Vienna in 1991 under Claudio Abbado, Furrer has been one of the most important exponents of contemporary music. In 1996, he was invited to his first residency at Lucerne Festival. His debut stage work Die Blinden (1989) was followed by Narcissus (1994), Begehren (2001), Invocation (2003), and Wüstenbuch (2010), as well as the audio theater work Fama, which Christoph Marthaler staged in Donaueschingen in 2005 and for which Furrer was honored with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006. The opera La bianca notte was produced in Hamburg in 2015, and his most recent stage work, Violetter Schnee, which is based
on a story by Vladimir Sorokin, premiered at the Staatsoper Berlin in 2019. His numerous awards include the Music Prize of the City of Duisburg (1993), the City of Vienna Prize for Music (2003), the Austrian State Prize for Music (2014), and the Siemens Music Prize (2018). Beat Furrer taught as a full professor of composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz from 1991 to 2023, and he held a visiting professorship at the University of Music in Frankfurt am Main from 2006 to 2009.

Furrer made his debut at Lucerne Festival (IMF) as a conductor on 30 August 1991 leading the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich in his orchestral work Face de la chaleur.

July 2024