溫伯格/潘德雷茲基/施尼特凱: 弦樂三重奏
里瑞科三重奏

TRIO LIRICO
FRANZISKA PIETSCH violin
SOPHIA REUTER viola
JOHANNES KREBS cello

The Trio Lirico has programmed three composers who lived and worked on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain
until 1989: for Franziska Pietsch and Sophia Reuter this is music which – paraphrasing Goethe – they “search with
their souls”. “As children, we both lived in East Berlin and were close friends already”, Franziska Pietsch explains
about her violist colleague. “We therefore share personal history, a similar style of playing and a similar non-verbal
way of communicating about this music. We just feel it.”

This personal form of perception, into which the Bremen cellist Johannes Krebs blends empathetically, is not
irrelevant for this music which becomes accessible not just via the text but also to a high degree via the cultural
and political environment in which it was written. Of course Krzysztof Penderecki (b.1933), following the political
liberalisation of Polish music from 1956, had the opportunity to tie in with avant-garde developments in the
West and to create his very own and unique modernism. On the other hand, his generational colleague Alfred
Schnittke (1934-1998) and the older Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) had, until the end of the Soviet Union, to
assert their music in the face of massive harassment from the authorities which, in Weinberg’s case, went as far as
being arrested for anti-Semitic reasons.

Born in Warsaw, Weinberg, who fled to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, kept in close contact
with his friend and mentor Dmitri Shostakovich. Nonetheless, Weinberg’s music is entirely unique, and his string
trio of 1950 strikes a balance between popular tunes and references to Yiddish music. Alfred Schnittke, who found
it hard gaining acceptance on account of his (Volga) German and Jewish heritage, composed his trio in 1985 for the
birthday of his illustrious colleague Alban Berg – and, shortly after completing the work, suffered a life-threatening
stroke, retrospectively lending this work a tragic note. The most recent work recorded here is by Poland’s most
eminent living composer, Krzysztof Penderecki: in 1991 he wrote his string trio as a great improvisation for three
performers with a strict and wild fugue.