Trio Accanto - Other Stories (2020)

The Trio Accanto, with its instrumentation of saxophone, piano and percussion, lures composers out of their reserve and tempts them to look beyond their own musical horizons. This is also shown by the collection of works on this album, with which the ensemble documents its challenging and entertaining repertoire.

Helmut Lachenmann's "Marche fatale" is a derailment: a highly virtuoso and brilliantly composed march with which the master of noisy music and advanced playing techniques breaks with familiar listening habits - in the skilful use of major-minor tonality, often enough demonized in avant-garde circles. His "Sakura Variations" are also anything but noisy, but rather melodious and postmodern collaged works, which sequence the present recording in three versions.

In addition, the production of three other composers brings together one work each: Martin Schüttler's "xerox", a play on the trashy aesthetics of everyday electronics, surprises with silvery, luminous sounds - which later reveal themselves to be the product of a copying machine. With "In Between", Yu Kuwabara provides an abstract scenario of contrasting sound characters and glittering wave movements. Martin Smolka's "fff (Fortissimo feroce Fittipaldi)" is extreme: the miniature briefly and wildly traces a race by the Brazilian racing driver Emerson Fittipaldi. Michael Finnissy's "Opera of the Nobility" follows a clear symmetrical architecture: With the title and quotations, the composer weaves a relationship between inner and outer music, past and present.