Daniel Ottensamer (principal clarinet of the Vienna Philharmonic), Stephan Koncz (cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic) and pianist Christoph Traxler, three Austrian artists who have known each other since childhood, decided to dedicate themselves to a vast and worldwide unique project:

A comprehensive recording of the repertoire for clarinet, cello & piano called „The Clarinet Trio Anthology“.

The history of this formation is quite remarkable as a great number of famous composers, starting with Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, and many of their peers including Max Bruch, Gabriel Fauré, Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Zemlinsky, Nino Rota, decided to write pieces for clarinet trio, some of them well-known, others still hidden treasures. Exciting part of this new major collection is the world-premiere recording of a recently discovered fragment for clarinet trio by Arnold Schoenberg which was directly inspired by the composition of his teacher and brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky.

The whole recording project resulted in a comprehensive 7-CD box set to be released in June 2022 at the major label „Decca“ and also available here.

The ensemble will now present their repertoire in concerts and on tours, starting with works from the Viennese Classicism, German Romanticism and the French Impressionism, in combination with highly intriguing pieces of the 20th century.

THE CLARINET TRIO:
A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

When do we ever get time to explore a niche genre like the clarinet trio? The first coronavirus lockdown was one such opportunity for the clarinettist Daniel Ottensamer, the violoncellist Stephan Koncz and the pianist Christoph Traxler. And whereas many artists at that time may have reacted overhastily, these three musicians preferred to use the time to delve more deeply into the works written for their resources and discover the influences that the magisterial trios of Beethoven and Brahms have exerted on other composers, a search that has taken them through several centuries and across every continent.

“We started with these two great trios,” Ottensamer explains, “but our journey took us further and further away from our point of departure and led us to increasingly exciting places.” And there is no doubt that the present anthology explores completely new areas, travelling to fin-de-siècle France, tracing the influence of jazz and contemporary music, settling briefly in Vienna, where the players even perform an unfinished piece by Schoenberg, and juxtaposing the great masterpieces of the past with new sounds from the present day.

“Our initial idea was to juxtapose these mainstream works with contemporary pieces, but our work on this project eventually got so out of hand that there was no end to the works that we discovered for our ensemble,” Stephan Koncz explains. “In all of them the tonal variety of the clarinet and the interplay between the three instruments is explored in completely different ways.”

Ottensamer and Koncz played together from a very early age; in each case one of their parents came to Vienna from Hungary in the 1970s in order to make music. They met up with Christoph Traxler when all three were studying music. “We’ve been performing together for fifteen years,” he says, “and especially with a project like this one, which because of the pandemic has lasted over a year and required so much joint effort in terms of tracking down pieces and working on them, it was important to know each other very well and to be able to trust each other to set out together on this voyage of discovery and examine more and more new approaches in the course of our rehearsals.”

In this way the three musicians have discovered very disparate facets of the clarinet trio and uncovered a vast range of compositions. “I assume that composers are fond of this combination of instruments because the instruments in question open up an incredible number of musical possibilities and the most wide-ranging sonorities,” says Koncz. The compass of the clarinet, violoncello and piano is very large when compared to that of other instruments, in addition to which the clarinet is able to play insanely rapid sequences of notes. It is also the instrument which, quite apart from its role in Classical and Romantic works, has embraced new styles such as jazz (especially in the piece by Daniel Schnyder) and klezmer music. As for the piano, it serves not only as a harmony instrument in some of the present pieces but also as a percussion instrument and as a rhythm instrument. In modern works like those by Jörg Widmann and Wolfgang Rihm, there is a tendency for all three instruments to be taken to their furthest extremes – this even goes so far as to demand that the pianist pluck the strings of his instrument with a plectrum in order to produce harmonics.

This project grew over time from a single idea to a comprehensive anthology. The three performers decided to focus on pieces that had originally been written for their particular resources and not to include the many arrangements that exist. They begin with Beethoven’s op. 11 and end with Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Trio, in which all three instruments are taken to their limits in terms of their sonorities and technical capabilities. Between these two extremes lies a long and exciting journey which, as all three musicians have noted, keeps returning to the musical tradition of their home city of Vienna. “It’s astonishing how often composers borrow from Viennese dances by reworking ländlers or appealing to one of the Viennese schools in which the two forebears of the clarinet trio, Beethoven and Brahms, were at home,” says Christoph Traxler.

I. IN THE BEGINNING WAS BEETHOVEN

Who but Beethoven should begin this anthology? His “Gassenhauer” Trio is the prototype of the witty and good-humoured clarinet trio that combines genius and popularity, more especially in its final movement. The word “Gassenhauer” means a popular song and in this case it refers to a motif from Joseph Weigl’s L’amor marinaro ossia Il corsaro, which was then drawing large crowds to the Burgtheater. It is this motif that provides the theme for the final movement’s set of variations. The work as a whole was undoubtedly inspired by Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio. In 1799 the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described Beethoven’s op. 11 as “not always easy to play but it certainly flows along more smoothly than many of the composer’s other works and makes a very good ensemble on the fortepiano with its keyboard accompaniment”. Beethoven wrote this trio for violin or for clarinet (specifically for the clarinettist Joseph Bähr), and the same is true of his Trio op. 38, sometimes also known as his “Grand Trio”, a reworking of his Septet in E flat major op. 20.

Beethoven clearly felt that the popularity of his Septet justified his reworking it as a trio, which he hoped would promote sales of the earlier piece. The Trio’s six movements constitute an example of large-scale form scored for modest resources, an idea that Mozart had already explored to masterful effect in his Divertimento in E flat major K. 563 for string trio. This was undoubtedly the source of Beethoven’s inspiration. The result is a work with a wonderful serenade and a Tempo di Menuetto in which Beethoven celebrates burlesque Viennese dance music. And it naturally features a piano cadenza that Beethoven – a gifted improviser – presumably reinvented at each private performance of the piece. The present recording incorporates a cadenza specially written by Christoph Traxler. Both the Septet and the Trio exude a love of life and an extrovert joviality that are in stark contrast to the often introvert, calculated and both intellectually challenging and virtuosic chamber music that the already deaf composer wrote towards the end of his life.

Arvo Pärt’s Mozart-Adagio spans the gulf between the Viennese trio tradition and the present day. The Estonian composer is well known for music that strikes a note of religious transcendentalism while also combining different metres. The present piece welds original Mozartian elements with his own tintinnabular style and places Mozart’s favourite dramatic interval of a second beneath his compositional microscope and produces a memory of grief and pain through the dissonant friction that ensues. This musical and spiritual encounter between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries constitutes a journey through time and space and represents what might be described as the first solid link that holds together this whole collection of works.

II. BRAHMS THE COLOSSUS

Brahms is the second great pillar of this anthology after Beethoven. It is no accident that his Clarinet Trio is regarded as the prototype of his late-period style: mellow, calm, detached and tranquil, while never denying an element of bitterness. There is no doubt that it was Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinettist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, who was responsible for the very special sound world that it inhabits. Mühlfeld’s mellow tone inspired Brahms again and again, encouraging the composer to refer affectionately to the player’s instrument as “Fräulein Clarinet”. Mühlfeld became friends with Brahms in March 1891, and it was for him that the composer wrote both his Clarinet Trio in A minor op. 114 and his B minor Quintet op. 115 later that same year, allowing the player to make his international breakthrough. By this period in its history, the clarinet was no longer regarded as fashionable, but between them, Brahms and Mühlfeld helped to bring about a revival of its fortunes. It is fascinating to see how it has always been the great solo clarinettists who have inspired composers to write for their instrument. In this way Mühlfeld became for Brahms what Anton Stadler had been for Mozart:
a source of inspiration. In 1891 Brahms overcame his feelings of weariness as a composer and by way of a sensuous adieu wrote his Clarinet Trio in A minor.

Mannheim-born composer Robert Kahn remained faithful to the world that Brahms’s masterpiece inhabits throughout his lengthy career. At their one and only meeting in 1886, Brahms left such a lasting impression on his younger colleague that Kahn spent the rest of his professional life seeking to emulate his great idol. Stephan Koncz recalls that “for us Kahn was a genuine discovery, he was more than just an imitator but had a unique ability to place himself firmly in the tradition of his idol”. From 1894 Kahn taught at Berlin’s Royal College of Music and in 1916 became a member of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, but as a Jew he was forced to emigrate to England in 1938. His old country house in Feldberg is now a youth hostel. He remained in England after the war was over and died at Biddenden in the county of Kent in 1951. His output then fell into neglect and is only now being slowly rediscovered.

As a composer Wolfgang Rihm invariably has the history of music and its links to the present day in his thoughts. Chiffre IV is an extremely dramatic piece for bass clarinet, violoncello and piano in which sustained notes are repeatedly interrupted by rests, while well-placed accents and brief motifs alternate in rapid succession, their dynamics shifting with quicksilver speed. Rihm was especially excited by the idea of creating full-toned sonorities within the trio. He himself has said: “The musicians play in the awareness that they are performing a piece for small orchestra.”

III. VIENNESE MOODS

Brahms was also the aesthetic springboard for Alexander Zemlinsky’s Trio of 1896 – the year before Brahms’s death. Zemlinsky made no secret of his harmonic, melodic and timbral borrowings from Brahms’s op. 114, but at the same time he continued to work within the Viennese tradition, a tradition that together with Mahler and Richard Strauss he himself helped to define. And yet Zemlinsky’s invariable point of reference is the strict motivic writing of Beethoven and Brahms, which he takes a stage further and in doing so lays one of the foundation stones of Modernism. His own works move constantly between the traditional and the new, performing a kind of Dionysian dance on the cusp of the future, without, however, transcending that boundary. With Zemlinsky the material always remains indebted to the Classical tradition.

Schoenberg was the first composer to cross this barrier. As we know, he was Zemlinsky’s pupil, later his comrade-in-arms and finally also his brother-in-law. The fragmentary piece by Schoenberg that is heard in the present anthology is only sixteen bars long but it is a veritable trouvaille that Daniel Ottensamer’s trio found more or less by chance in the archives of the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. “It was a genuine discovery for us,” says Ottensamer. “And we were delighted to find that Schoenberg, too, had taken an interest in the clarinet trio as a medium – unfortunately far too briefly.” “It’s interesting,” Koncz adds, “that like the Zemlinsky Trio, it’s in D minor and opens in a very similar mood. In other words, it refers specifically to Zemlinsky’s Trio, but for some reason Schoenberg neg­lected to elaborate this lightning flash of inspiration. We’d all have been fascinated to know how he would have gone on to develop this material.”

The composer Friedrich Cerha is Viennese through and through. Born in 1926, he developed an interest in Neoclassicism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War but by the 1950s he had aligned himself with the New Viennese School, before finally creating his own, free world of sound. In his Five Pieces, it is the violoncello that tends to be more central to the writing since Cerha wrote them for Heinrich Schiff’s fiftieth birthday. As Stephan Koncz observes, “it was undoubtedly Schiff who inspired the writing in the cello’s higher register, although all three instruments are taken to the very limits of what is playable”. Brimming with energy, the middle movements of this powerful work culminate in a final movement that resembles a kind of funeral march.

This stroll through the streets of Vienna ends with a work by the late-Romantic pianist and composer Carl Frühling, who died in 1937 and was subsequently forgotten for far too long. He came to Vienna from Lemberg (modern Lviv) and played with a number of chamber groups, including the legendary Rosé Quartet, which took its name from the Vienna Philharmonic’s concertmaster at that time, Arnold Rosé, who led the orchestra for over fifty years and was married to one of Mahler’s sisters. The present Trio is a delightful piece, not least because of its charming second movement, filled with Viennese grace, to say nothing of the Wagnerian echoes in its third movement and the Bohemian verve of its final Allegro vivace.

IV. A TRIP TO FRANCE

Our foray across the French border brings us into direct contact with the quintessentially French type of clarinet trio that evolved in Paris. We begin with a composer who is unfortunately often forgotten in the German-speaking world, although in her own lifetime Louise Farrenc was regarded as one of the most colourful figures on the capital’s musical scene. She was born in Paris in 1804, married the music publisher Aristide Farrenc in 1821 and from 1842 taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Her music breathes the spirit of Mendelssohn, but she is also remembered for her attempts to ensure that men and women received equal pay at the Conservatoire, a request that was finally granted by the institution’s director Daniel-François-Esprit Auber in 1850. Among her works, her Nonet was particularly successful – the violinist Joseph Joachim was among the players who took part in its first performance. She gave up composition following the deaths of her daughter and husband, and it was only much later that her music was rediscovered.

Gabriel Fauré’s magisterial Trio op. 120 was originally conceived for clarinet, violoncello and piano but then reworked for the more usual resources of the piano trio. It was Fauré’s publisher, Jacques Durand, who hoped that by suggesting the idea of a trio he might help the now blind composer to overcome his depression and build on the success of Ravel’s Piano Trio of 1914. Daniel Ottensamer admits that he “felt a little uncomfortable including this work in our anthology because Fauré completed only one and a half movements of his clarinet version. Instead – and presumably on the advice of his publisher – he completed it for the violin, an instrument that was more popular at that time. In fact I believe that he had the sound of the clarinet in his mind’s ear while he was working on this piece because it seems to me that the violin part lies very low, whereas it is at the normal pitch for a clarinet.” Above all, it is the mixture of sonorities created by the clarinet and violoncello that makes this piece so special for Ottensamer.

Our voyage to Paris ends with the powerful and Romantic clarinet trio by Vincent d’Indy, a pupil of César Franck and an admirer of Wagner. D’Indy led a fascinating life: the son of an ancient family of aristocrats, he hoped to bring about radical reforms at the Paris Conservatoire but failed spectacularly in his bid and so he founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894 with the aim of reviving the music of much earlier composers such as Palestrina, Monteverdi and Rameau as well as Gregorian chant. His awareness of history also inspired his clarinet trio, a work that is striking, not least on account of its sheer dimensions. It opens with a great Ouverture, after which its second movement evolves into an effervescent Divertissement, while the following ”Chant élégiaque“ culminates in an almost hypnotically meditative passage suggestive of pilgrims singing. The final movement is another example of typical Gallic wit.

V. THE GERMAN SOUL

If Beethoven and Brahms represent the pillars of this collection of clarinet trios, then it is to their German heirs that we must now turn. Like Beethoven, Ferdinand Ries was a native of Bonn and like Beethoven he moved to Vienna – in his case in 1801. Here in the Austrian capital he became one of only two piano pupils of Beethoven – the other was Carl Czerny. In September 1805 he left the city in a hurry in order to avoid being conscripted by the Austrian army in its war against Napoleon. He returned to Vienna in 1808 and worked as Beethoven’s secretary but following disagreements with his teacher he left for Russia and then spent some years in London before retiring to his native Rhineland. His Violin Concerto op. 24 and Trio op. 28 are both believed to date from 1810. Both reflect the experiences that Ries had gleaned in Vienna. The Trio in particular picks up from Beethoven’s great trio tradition.

Max Bruch was fond of comparing himself to his contemporary Johannes Brahms, about whom he once said: “In only fifty years from now, his light will shine brightly as that of the most outstanding composer of all time, whereas people will remember me chiefly for my G minor Violin Concerto.” As a rule Bruch set out to write more popular works such as his Eight Pieces op. 83, which was originally scored for clarinet, viola and piano but later reworked for clarinet, violoncello and piano. These musical fairytales were dedicated to the composer’s son, Max Felix, who had made a name for himself as a clarinettist with his “pure, lean tone and phrasing”. Three of these pieces are particularly impressive as atmospheric portraits in music: the highly dramatic third, the fifth with its Romanian folk melody and the sixth with its wonderful nocturne.

The composer and clarinettist Jörg Widmann naturally takes his place on the roster of Beet­ho­ven’s heirs. His early Nachtstück begins playfully with the as yet only tentative interaction of the three instruments but it also includes radical changes of style and moments reminiscent of a musical box that ultimately suggest the idea of time slipping away with the twelve chimes heard on the piano. This is a piece that plays uninhibitedly and delightfully with a chamber of horrors made up of fear and terror.

VI. A MINIATURE WORLD TOUR

The clarinet trio’s triumphal march across the planet also allows us a glimpse of the wide range of forms and different expressive possibilities available to this group of instruments. Mikhail Glinka was a great opera lover and on a visit to Milan he became friendly with the bel canto composer Vincenzo Bellini, whose pronounced melodic vein inspired his Trio pathétique, a point particularly well illustrated by the piece’s clarinet lines – legend has it that in writing this piece Glinka was seeking to come to terms with his own physical breakdown. At the work’s first performance at La Scala, Milan, in 1832, the bassoon soloist is said to have been so moved by what he heard that he exclaimed, “Ma questo è disperazione!” (“This is what true despair sounds like!”) Glinka’s trio reveals its composer developing his music from the operatic tradition of western Europe and, more specifically, from the world of Italian music, with its arias and cantabile beauties.

Paul Juon brings Russo-Nordic colour to this mix in his Trio Miniaturen. Juon was born in Moscow in 1872 but later moved to Berlin, where Joseph Joachim appointed him professor of composition at the city’s Royal College of Music. These four movements begin with a sentimental stroke of genius in the form of a profoundly sensuous “Rêverie”, followed by a “Humoreske”. The ensuing Elegy is a lament in F minor, while the “Danse phantastique” is a kind of Swiss ländler with eerie interjections that scurry past us in our mind’s eye. It seems likely that Juon was inspired to write this waltz in 5/4 time by the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie pathétique.

Daniel Schnyder’s A Friday Night in August of 2004 transcends all the limits that had characterized the clarinet trio until then. A saxophonist by training, Schnyder is one of today’s most frequently performed composers. He hails from the world of jazz and has already prepared arrangements of a number of pieces by the Rolling Stones and Duke Ellington. In A Friday Night in August he opens the doors to the world. Here the clarinet strikes a distinctly jazz-like note.

A more Impressionistic note, by contrast, is struck by the trio Rencontre by the Korean composer Isang Yun, who in the 1960s took part alongside John Cage and Bruno Maderna in the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. In 1967 he was abducted and returned to Korea but was released two years later and brought back to Berlin. “It is truly remarkable,” says Christoph Traxler, “that Yun was able to create a world of sound that was entirely his own, which he did by means of glissandos on the cello and the quarter-tones that allowed him to create a very special world of sound that might be described as ‘Pan-Asiatic’.” The piece makes great play of flowing cantabile lines with repeated interjections from the clarinet, deliberately unsettling listeners with its harmonic and rhythmic uncertainty.

A piece by Nino Rota, the legendary composer of countless film scores, brings this particular CD to an end with an entertaining and sparkling work that exemplifies cinema music at its good-humoured best, here showcased in the format of a chamber music piece that reminds Stephan Koncz of the sight “of a Fiat 500 which, for whatever reason, is driving along narrow streets”.

VII. NORDIC MIST

Our journey began with two titans of the trio repertory, Beethoven and Brahms, after which we travelled via Austria to France, Germany and Russia. It ends in the mists of a rain-swept North Sea coast. One of Benjamin Britten’s composition teachers was John Ireland, whose Trio breathes this damp, British sea air. Its second movement is written in the style of an English jig and is based on a sea shanty, but the third movement tells of disaster: we hear a burial, while the constant toll of bells accompanies the soul of the departed on its journey heavenwards.

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Cortège for Chris creates an almost ghostlike impression: a brief trio with unsettling chromaticisms that create a world of emptiness and eeriness. The piece was written in memory of one of the composer’s friends, the cellist Christopher van Kampen.

There is a certain grooviness to Robert Muczynski’s Fantasy Trio, with its typically American dances, its elegy and its lively final movement, the theme of which recalls the soundtrack to the Flintstones cartoons.

By the time that we reach Per Nørgård’s Spell we no longer feel to be on solid ground. The piece is notable for its echoes of minimalism and its tendency to build up layers of voices and bars in the most sophisticated ways imaginable, resulting in a breathless undertow of sound. In writing this piece, Nørgård experimented with a new type of notation that he devised specially for this work: the size of the notes is an indication of the importance that the performers are intended to attach to them. What is clear is that this piece must sound different at each performance and that it was never meant to be carved in stone. Rather, it should flow along like some great river.

This anthology culminates in a work by Magnus Lindberg in which he explores the technical and physical limits of the clarinet, taking them to their furthest extreme. Daniel Ottensamer notes that “it was never Lindberg’s intention to take the instrument apart. What he wanted to do was to examine its tonal possibilities right up to the highest reaches of its range.” This is also true of the two other instruments. Lindberg’s work is all about extremes. Its three movements are headed “Ljud stort, ljud” (Sound big, sound), “Som det stilla vi söker” (Like the tranquillity we seek) and “Slå våg, slå” (Crash wave, crash). And so we end on the very brink of all that is humanly possible.

Axel Brüggemann
Translation: texthouse