Trio Recherche - Wolfgang Rihm: Musik fur drei Streicher (1999)

The sixty-minute Musik für drei Steicher was one of those works with which the young Wolfgang Rihm blew open with eruptive force the well-established rituals marking the boundaries of contemporary music. A music without distance and taboo, mercilessly physical, gestural, almost brutal. Using a rather abrupt editing technique, the most varied worlds collide, while all neatly separated styles are agitated against one another. The "compulsive, threatening and embracing aspect of music" (Rihm), self-renunciation in the form of alienation and defamiliarisation, the composer as a seismograph of both the inner and the outer world and the composition as a record of a momentary, unguarded and open mobility -all these factors, here brilliantly interpreted by the trio recherche, help to create an experience on the very highest level of energy.