When TrioColores performs the works of French composers, up to 2 marimbas, 3 vibraphones, and 2 glockenspiels are used - sometimes more, sometimes less. The three Swiss and Austrian musicians allowed themselves five years of development work for their first album program. The common denominator: a great passion for exploring the infinite potential of percussion instruments.

Arranging music for mallet instruments has become a heartfelt project for the trio, which has reached a milestone with the completion of "EnCouleur." With their arrangements, they create a unique repertoire in which the music not only receives a new sonic garment but also gains a completely new expression in the nuanced language of percussion.

At the release concerts, alongside the album program featuring masterpieces by Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre, there will also be a world premiere by Fabian Künzli. The Swiss composer engaged artistically with the music of "EnCouleur" and created a composition that interacts artistically with the program.

TrioColores looks forward to welcoming you to the concerts at the Kirche Altishofen or the Rathaus Frauenfeld!

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„Having written several concertos for percussion - multi-percussion pieces - I was thrilled to hear from the TrioColores that they would like a concerto that focuses on mallet instruments.

A concerto that focuses on the melodic side of these beautiful instruments and brings a gentler, more expressive, side of percussion to the orchestral world. I imagine two marimbas and a vibraphone, taking both melodic and harmonic roles in this piece. I hear this piece as a meeting point of European art music - from its early days in the 1600s with music of the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa. I imagine the complex rhythmic counterpoint of Balinese and Subsaharan traditions blending with Baroque Harmony. In other parts, Arabic ornamentations develop bel canto melodies, and traditional Jewish songs become arias. Ultimately, I hear this piece as one stretch of time - perhaps made of smaller sections - but never giving way to complete silence.“

Avner Dorman

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By commissioning the American-Israeli composer Avner Dorman, we are fulfilling a long-awaited wish. Avner Dorman is a very special composer for us percussionists. He has an extraordinary knack for handling percussion instruments, which is evident in several solo works for percussion and orchestra. He is an absolute master of uniting music from different cultures into a new sound language all his own. We, too, have recently been very busy putting music from the repertoire of other instruments into a new sonic context. Therefore, the symbiosis between Avner Dorman's music and our musical creation is enormously interesting and promising for us.

Our goal was to commission a work that has meaning in the short and long term. We want this 30-minute work to be experienced by the broad concert audience around the world, both live in the concert hall and medially processed on the popular platforms of social media.

The first CD of the ensemble TrioColores is dedicated to French music at the time of the turn of the century. The three young musicians Matthias Kessler, Luca Staffelbach and Fabian Ziegler shed new light on the tonal possibilities of the comparatively young instrument group percussion.

With works by Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre, there is an exciting symbiosis of masterpieces of classical literature and sounds of percussion with which we illuminate the time of the "Finde Siecle. Hearing these works in a new way, feeling them in a new way and presenting them in an extraordinary sound is a further step to anchor the percussion in the classical music world in a contemporary, progressive and appealing way.

This period at the turn of the 19th/20th century is characterized by sweeping, ornamental melodicism, harmony that pushes the boundaries of tonality, and colorful instrumentation. All these compositional factors and the fact that almost all the selected works had already been adapted or even orchestrated in some form for other instruments by the composer himself or renowned artists, gave us the motivation to arrange these works for baton instruments and to realize them united on one recording. In this way we illuminate a period from the symphonic poem, through the two important impressionists Debussy and Ravel, to a new sound of the "Groupe de Six", to which Milhaud and Tailleferre belonged.

Works from the piano literature are particularly adaptable to percussion instruments, since both the producing of sound and the associated way of making music are essentially comparable to those of the mallet instruments. Through the multi-layered sound possibilities of percussion, we lend our own arrangements nuanced tonal colorations that often cannot cross the threshold of appeal in the original composition for piano and thus do not find their way to the audience.

One of the greatest challenges that percussionists encounter again and again is the relatively young and not yet very comprehensive repertoire of percussion. This is due to the fact that the instrumental field of percussion in a solo chamber music context has not existed for very long. Composer legends such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven only occasionally used the timpani in an orchestral context. A repertoire for mallet instruments, for example, has been established only slowly since the beginning of the 20th century and is still emerging. In this matter TrioColores is very committed. Expanding the contemporary percussion repertoire is a major endeavour of the trio. Collaborations and the commissioning of major compositions by renowned composers such as Avner Dorman crown the work of the ensemble. Numerous dedicated compositions, such as those by Nils Rohwer, Ivan Trevino and Rainer Rubbert, among others, can also be credited to the three musicians. In addition to their own arrangements, the new works are also very popular with the audience, both live in concert and online on all major streaming platforms.

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