CD production "En Couleur"

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.