Review of the Forum Wallis 2026 Festival of New Music
From June 4 to July 4, 17 concerts took place in Geneva, Sion, the Saas and Lötschental valleys, and as far as Münster in the Goms. For the first time, the Goms served as the festival’s actual epicenter.
At the festival’s 20th-anniversary edition, music by 95 composers from over 40 countries was performed, 16 of whom were from Valais. Forty works were performed in Switzerland for the first time, and 13 works had their world premieres. Ninety-five percent of the pieces were no more than four years old.
Given the size and distance of the venues, the concerts were better attended than expected. The audience was delighted and grateful for the quality, attention to detail, originality, and uncompromising approach, as well as for the emotional depth and freshness of the program. Planning for the 2027 edition of the festival is already underway.
Forum Wallis is an international festival for new music founded in 2006 and organized by IGNM-VS, the local chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Its board of directors is composed of internationally active musicians and composers from Valais: Manuel Mengis, Hans-Peter Pfammatter, Ulrike Mayer-Spohn, and Javier Hagen.
Since its founding, Forum Wallis has co-produced over 350 world premieres and presented works by more than 500 composers from around the world, including Stockhausen’s Helicopter string quartet together with the Arditti Quartet, André Richard, and Air Glaciers, Holliger's Alb-Chehr and Cod.Acts Pendulum Choir.
Five Hours of String Quartet
The 2026 edition of the festival kicked off on the afternoon of Corpus Christi at the Münstiger Church in Goms. The German Minguet Quartet performed Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, the longest work ever composed in this genre—a plea for slowing down, patience, and perseverance.
With a running time of about 5 hours, the Minguets opted for a mid-tempo interpretation. The piece delicately wove its way through time, dissolving conventional perceptions of time. It is remarkable that more than 60 people attended the concert over its entire duration in a village of 300 residents.
Two groups improvise
On June 5 and 6, also in Münster, two top ensembles from the Swiss and European improvisation scene performed: Voutchkova/Strahl/Mengis/Pfammatter and Erb/Mayas/Läng. Both evenings enchanted the audience with their chamber-music-like intimacy and the palpable closeness and rapport among the musicians.
Transformed Poetry
On Sunday, June 7, all the cycles from the poetry collection were featured throughout the day In the close-up we run wild by Rolf Hermann, to be heard at «Münster Earport» MEbU, the art space for contemporary music in Goms. The new music duo UMS’nJIP and Luis Tabuenca, winner of the 2026 Reina Sofia Composition Prize, transformed the four poetry cycles In the Störgarten, Stolen Windows, Neophytes and one into intimate song cycles.
Teenagers Play Piano Music with Live Electronics
Under the Adventurous Sounds label, the Proyecto Piano Joven (PPJ) from Seville—a project for young pianists that has been in existence for 20 years—performed in Switzerland for the first time. Adventurous Sounds is an educational program series organized by Forum Wallis that introduces children and young people to contemporary music in a playful way.
At the conservatories in Geneva and Sion, the PPJ presented a total of nine works for piano and live electronics, all written specifically for them by renowned Spanish-speaking composers. Under the direction of Ignacio Torner, the teenagers performed a full program that, in terms of both composition and interpretation, was in no way inferior to that of a professional ensemble.
Folk Music from the Upper Valais and Bolivia
From June 26 to 28, the Upper Valais Folk Song Choir toured Saas, the Lötschental, and the Goms region together with Bolivian folk musician Juan Arnez. Here, too, in addition to dialect favorites sung together with the audience, innovation was a theme: new songs in the folk style by Stefan Ruppen, Manuela Lehner-Mutter, and Valentin Bregy, alongside five premieres in the Bolivian folk style by Juan Arnez.
Ars Electronica
On July 3 and 4, the festival at MEbU concluded with the final two concerts of the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis 2026 Selection Concerts. The first two concerts in the series had taken place at the same venue at the start of the festival. The program featured 32 pieces, and 17 others were on the “Highly Commended” list. Twenty-nine Swiss premieres were performed, along with three world premieres (Lund-Jensen, Duchenne, Otani).
More than a dozen composers traveled to the concerts from China, the United States, Germany, France, and Ireland. The four concerts provided a welcome opportunity for lively exchanges, not only within the music community but also with the local population, who turned out in large numbers to attend the concerts.
Noteworthy—and a topic of discussion particularly relevant to insiders—was the interpretive approach at the MEbU-Akusmonium: live diffusion. The layout of the MEbU-Akusmonium is not a standard configuration, but a deliberately asymmetrical one, designed specifically for this space by Simone Conforti of IRCAM in Paris and intended to be played live.
