Beat Furrer’s Enigmas began as an unaccompanied work for youth choir, designed to demonstrate that young singers could cope with far more demanding music than is usually assumed.
Between 2006 and 2013 Furrer, continued to add to the series, until it contained six pieces, all with texts from Leonardo da Vinci’s Prophecies, which may be performed separately or as a set. The aim of the settings changed, too, so that Enigma V is not only as long as the other five pieces put together, but technically goes way beyond what any amateur choir could possibly attempt. It makes the pieces a hugely attractive collection: a journey into ever-increasing complexity that is full of subtle transformations and strikingly original, sometimes strikingly simple, ideas – the perfect antidote to the neo-romantic pap that so often passes for choral music today.
The other two pieces on this immaculate, Finnish-sourced disc are almost equally striking. The rather Birtwistle-like Voices – Still, from 2001, became a scene in Furrer’s Orpheus-themed music-theatre piece Begehren, while ...Cold and Calm and Moving, for flute, harp and string trio, alternates passages of Feldman-like stillness and hypnotic obsessiveness with flurries of spidery activity – both very different; both equally intriguing.
