Trio Eclipse: Spheres
Prospero Classical

There's so much to admire about Trio Eclipse's Spheres, it's hard to know where to begin. There's the marvelous playing of clarinetist Lionel Andrey, pianist Benedek Horváth, and cellist Sebastian Braun for starters. After meeting as students at the Music Academy in Basel and recognizing that their instruments could approximate the hues associated with the wind, string, and keyboard families, the three formalized their union and quickly developed into a homogenous chamber entity. Trio Eclipse has won prizes at multiple competitions since 2016 and gave its debut concert at the Lucerne Festival in summer 2019. Spheres, the group's recording debut, came about soon after, with the sixty-seven-minute recording laid down over three days in October 2019 at a Switzerland studio.

With such contrasting instruments in play, the trio's sound is broad and rich, and the modest three-instrument presentation also grants the playing ample room to breathe. While Andrey sometimes assumes the melodic lead, the trio's playing is marked by balance, each element integral to the total effect. Though each player is a consummate, prize-winning musician in his own right, the focus is on group performance, even if each individually shines.

An excellently curated set-list also distinguishes the release, with works by two familiar figures joined by four premieres. It would be hard to think of a better choice of opener than George Gershwin's delightful An American in Paris, and the inclusion of a three-part work by Italian composer Nino Rota is also welcome. The pieces by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga, violinist-composer Simon Heggendorn, American composer Sean Hickey, and Swiss composer-saxophonist Daniel Schnyder are not only splendid individually but grant the trio broad stylistic and emotional palettes with which to work.

The long-form, single-movement An American in Paris (1928), a brilliant entry-point for the release, evokes the excitement of life in one of the world's great cities. The joy, irreverence, and adventure experienced by the American expatriate are brought to vivid life in the trio's assured rendering, their lines fluidly coalescing as they suggest the bustle of busy sidewalks and packed roadways. Such moments are offset by occasional interludes of calm and serenity, the composer uniting all such elements into an elegant, mercurial design. The work's major transition into slow, blues-flavoured territory occurs just past the eight-minute mark, the trio executing the shift gracefully, before the energy level heats up for the effervescent drive to the finale. Rota's of course best-known for the soundtrack material he created for Fellini (La strada, La dolce vita, etc.) and Coppola (The Godfather), but as his Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (1973) shows, he was as capable of writing equally enticing material for the concert hall. There's much to like about the chamber piece, from the devilish, melodically ravishing “Allegro” to its elegiac “Andante” and high-spirited “Allegrissimo.”

Demenga's Summer Breeze II deploys repetitive patterns yet, while such a gesture might suggest a tie to minimalism, its interlocking rhythmic swing hints at a jazz influence as much as anything else (watch for the virtuosic turn taken by Andrey five minutes into the piece). The composer characterized the piece as a “short, light, summery work,” but a word such as off-kilter could also apply. No piece on the recording sings as joyously as Heggendorn's Siena, which one imagines would be as effective as concert-opener as encore. For much of its seven minutes, this instant classic exudes rapture and radiance in equal measure, and Latin, pop, jazz, and blues elements find their way into the piece without it ever losing the plot, so to speak.

Diametrically opposite in mood to Siena is Hickey's Tiergarten, titled after the urban district in Berlin and representing the composer's attempt to distill the character of the setting into sound. Opening ominously as if to conjure the empty park area before dawn, the piece advances ponderously, with quotes of King Crimson (Three of a Perfect Pair) and David Bowie (Low) eventually emerging within material that turns a tad prog-like as it builds in dynamism. Spheres closes with A Friday Night in August (1996), Schnyder's attempt to musically capture his time living on Central Park West in the early ‘90s when different musics from the area, Caribbean, blues, and gospel among them, traveled to his fourth-storey window and eventually into the writing. It hardly surprises that the material teems with energy and ideas, the result a multi-layered thrill-ride that despite its density avoids collapsing into chaos.

July 2020