Ensemble Recherche - Wolfgang Rihm: Trios 1969-1994 (2000)

This CD combines Trio pieces for three instruments - and yet it is very remote from the contemplatively muted frame-work of traditional chamber music. A small group of musicians does not establish intimacy, but causes the gaps, warpings, abysses in Rihm's music to widen even further instead. When the three instrumentalists position themselves as far away from each other in the calm scene "am horizont" (on the horizon), this is only an external sign for the extreme tension that prevails: delicacy of sound and wild noise, falling silent and eloquence, conglomeration and decomposition - accompanied by covert (auto)biographical allusions to Ingeborg Bachman or Karlheinz Stockhausen, Rudi Stephan or Maurizio Kagel.