Forum Wallis

Founded in 2006, Forum Wallis is one of the major contemporary music festivals in Switzerland. It is organised by the newest local ISCM section in Switzerland, IGNM-VS, and administered by its founder JIP. Forum Wallis is dedicated to Contemporary Music in toto, but also focusses on the works of living Swiss and Valaisan composers and performing artists. The festival can look back on an exceptional history, with hundreds of premières, spectacular productions and numerous composers featured from across the globe. Among the highlights of its first decade have been Stockhausen’s Helikopter Streichquartett, Heinz Holliger’s Alpcheer and Cod.Act’s Pendulum Choir. Exhibitions have presented the work of world renowned artists such as Valentin Carron and Günther Uecker.

It’s impossible to be aware of everything that’s going on in the world of contemporary music. But having now – finally, in its thirteenth year (!) – experienced Forum Wallis, I realise that it’s too significant, too ambitious and too triumphant in its commitment to the most weird and wonderful new music to be ignored. The festival’s home, Leuk, may be a small town, but each one of its concerts felt every bit as epic and momentous as the mountains surrounding it.

5against4.com 08/2019

Forum Wallis is an international contemporary music festival that takes place annually over Whitsun at Leuk Castle in Valais, Switzerland. The festival is, so to speak, some kind of an obstetrician: a breeding, research and reflection place for musical creation in all its diversity – hence the egg appearing on the festival poster, symbolic of the simultaneously existing and the not-yet-born and utopian. Forum Wallis produces, mediates, documents and networks new music of local, national and international provenance. To date, it has presented the works of more than 70 local composers, who have shared stages with the greatest ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, recherche, Klangforum Wien and the Arditti Quartet. There have been over 300 world premieres since 2006 – in 2015 the four chief pilots of the legendary Air Glaciers probaly flew the best and safest performance to date of Stockhausen’s spectacular helicopter string quartet, as we were able to unite for the first time to date the most skilled experts for this piece not in Venice or Salzburg …but in Leuk. Forum Wallis is a key catalyst for new music in this area and plays an important pioneering role, which has had a remarkably positive effect on the local funding policy and on adventurous concert programs in favor of the Création Musicale.

ArtTourist 5/2019