String Trios by Goeyvaerts String Trio

Arnold Schönberg, Anton von Webern, Alfred Schnittke

Goeyvaerts String Trio

String Trios

Price: € 12.95
Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917237528
Catnr: CC 72375
Release date: 07 June 2010
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Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917237528

Catalogue number
CC 72375

Release date
07 June 2010

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

"Composers clearly tend to write string trios at crucial moments in their life or development as artists.

On 2 August 1946 the 72-year-old Schoenberg had a massive heart attack. He wrote his trio between 20 August and 23 September, while still in full recovery. He told his friends and students that the work formed an account of the traumatic experience of his illness. In his short essay Mein Todesfall, he even managed to see the humorous side of the experience. His pupil Leonard Stein recalls that Schönberg apparently meant the many strange, seemingly incoherent events in the trio (String Trio op. 45) as a musical depiction of his delirium after the heart attack. Pain and calm alternated unpredictably.

The String Trio op. 20 (1927) by Anton Webern (1883-1945) met with resistance at its appearance. The anecdote about the cellist James Whitehead, who during a concert in London’s Wigmore Hall left the stage after several bars announcing ‘I can’t play this thing’, is unfortunately all too well known. Whitehead called Webern’s music ‘a nightmare - not music at all, but mathematics’. By labeling the music ‘mathematical’, at the very least Whitehead revealed his vague sense of this music’s structural and compositional inventiveness. Webern’s trio is, like Schönberg’s, a dodecaphonic work, although dating from two decades earlier.

In contrast to Schönberg, Webern and Berg, Schnittke was clearly generous in his compositional style. Generally speaking, his compositions exhibit somewhat less of the rarefied succinctness that finds its most extreme expression in Webern’s music. The composition of this string trio seems to have been a very intense emotional experience for Schnittke. It is fairly well known just how much Schnittke, as a Soviet composer, suffered under the cultural isolation imposed on him by the Soviet authorities. Schnittke came from a cosmopolitan milieu (he was the son of a Jewish father and his mother was of German origin). Thanks to his father’s job he had spent part of his student years in Vienna. This explains the fact that this trio has the sound of a somewhat melancholy backward gaze on the Viennese music of such composers as Schubert, Mahler and Berg – works that he had learned in his youth." (Elise Simoens in the linernotes with this CD).

Emotionele en technisch veeleisende strijktrio’s uit de 20e eeuw
Dit album bevat 20e-eeuwse strijktrio’s, uitgevoerd door het Goeyvaerts String Trio.

Componisten schrijven vaak strijktrio’s op cruciale momenten in hun leven of carrière. Op 2 augustus 1946 kreeg de 72-jarige Schönberg een hartaanval. Hij schreef zijn Strijktrio op. 45 terwijl hij herstellende was, tussen 20 augustus en 23 september. Het werk beschrijft de traumatische ervaringen uit deze periode.

Het Strijktrio op. 20 van Webern uit 1927 werd met tegenstand ontvangen. De cellist James Whitehead verliet na enkele maten het podium tijdens een concert in Wigmore Hall, omdat hij het werk niet kon spelen. Whitehead noemde het werk een nachtmerrie. Het was voor hem geen muziek meer, maar wiskunde. Daarmee wees hij in ieder geval op de inventieve structuur van het trio.

Voor Schnittke was het componeren van zijn Strijktrio uit 1985 een intense emotionele ervaring. Hij leed onder de culturele isolatie die de autoriteiten uit de Sovjetunie hem oplegden. Schnittke bracht een deel van zijn leven door in Wenen. Vandaar dat het trio met weemoed terugkijkt naar de muziek van Schubert, Mahler en Berg.

Het Goeyvaerts String Trio is gespecialiseerd in muziek uit de 20e en 21e eeuw. In 2003 werden ze bekroond met de Trofee Fuga, een prijs die jaarlijks wordt uitgereikt door de Unie van Belgische Componisten. Ze bestuderen de muziek die ze uitvoeren intensief. Het trio speelt ongelooflijk goed en haalt een hoog niveau van perfectie!

Diese CD vereint emotional sehr intensive wie spieltechnisch hoch anspruchsvolle Streichtrios des 20.Jahrhunderts. Das Goeyvaerts Streichtrio wurde 1997 gegründet und konzentriert sich ausschließlich auf das Repertoire des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Benannt ist es nach dem belgischen Komponisten Karel Goeyvaerts (1929-1993), der in der Entwicklung innerhalb der europäischen Neuen Musik eine wichtige Rolle gespielt hat. // Bonus-Track: ?Schönberg Spricht? aus einer Rundfunkübertragung seines Streichtrios im Mai 1949.

Artist(s)

Goeyvaerts String Trio

The Goeyvaerts String Trio was founded in 1997 with the aim of performing exclusively 20th and 21st century repertoire. The trio takes its name from the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who played an important role in developments within European new music. The ensemble not only plays existing works but is also active in commissioning new string trios. The Goeyvaerts String Trio consists of Fedra Coppens (violin), Vincent Hepp (viola), and Pieter Stas (cello). Their CD featuring string trios by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alfred Schnittke was released by the renowned international label Challenge Records. This CD received the highest ratings in various magazines and, among other things, a Gold Label from Klassiek Centraal, a nomination for best CD production for...

Their CD featuring string trios by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alfred Schnittke was released by the renowned international label Challenge Records. This CD received the highest ratings in various magazines and, among other things, a Gold Label from Klassiek Centraal, a nomination for best CD production for the Klara’s, and a recommendation in Gramophone. In 2012, a new CD entitled String Trios from the East was released, featuring trios by Sofia Gubaidulina, Alexander Knaifel, Oleg Paiberdin, and Giya Kancheli. Luister wrote: ‘What the three musicians achieve here in terms of concentration and precision borders on the impossible. The trio then launched Stabat Mater in 2014,

consisting of Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater in just intonation and Simeron by Ivan Moody. With the help of more than 500 international investors, the Goeyvaerts String Trio raised £15,000. Muziekcentrum Vlaanderen wrote about the trio: ‘It is well known that they are excellent; that they also achieved this is a testament to their enthusiastic entrepreneurship.’ This CD was showered with superlatives in the press, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone, Luister 10, etc. More recently, this recording was awarded an Edison and the trio was named musician/ensemble of the year by Klara (classical radio station), and the City of Sint-Niklaas also honored the trio with the 2014 Culture Prize.

In February 2016, Whispers of Titans was released, featuring string trios by Nikolaj Korndorf and Henryk Górecki. Their CD with Klang by Wolfgang von Schweinitz was recorded for the Louth Contemporary Music Society in 2020. Charles Wuorinen’s second string trio (2018) is dedicated to the Goeyvaerts String Trio, and its world premiere took place at the Guggenheim in New York. During Stations of the Sun 2019 in Dundalk (Ireland), they performed two world premieres by Linda Catlin Smith and Pascale Criton. In October 2019, they premiered Robin Verheyen’s Blues, Reds and other Songs at AMUZ. Blues, Reds and other Songs was recorded on vinyl together with Marc Copland and Robin Verheyen and released in 2025.

In 2025, a second album was released with music by Robin Verheyen in collaboration with Robyn Schulkowsky based on the works of painter Jakob Smits.

As ensemble-in-residence at the KMSKA, they developed programs around the museum’s renovation and collection, including a project with saxophonist Andrew Claes (STUFF) in which real-time data was used for scores for strings and robots. With the support of their home city of Sint-Niklaas, they curate the annual Passages festival, which brings together local and international talent from different genres.

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Kristien Roels

Kris Matthynssens

Pieter Stas

Composer(s)

Anton von Webern

Together with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, with whom he formed the Second Viennese School, Webern laid the foundation for a large part of 20th-century music. Yet, he did so in a completely unique way. Whereas Berg was still largely influenced by the Romantic Period, and Schoenberg was a true expressionist, Webern took a more adventurous path. Of course, his music was just as atonal as the music of his peers, but he turned away from the classical-romantic tradition in many more ways. Generally, his pieces are short works written for small ensembles. Above all, his works sound empty. Webern became a man of miniatures, of which his Variations for piano op. 27 are his best-known examples. Moreover, in his rigid music...

Generally, his pieces are short works written for small ensembles. Above all, his works sound empty. Webern became a man of miniatures, of which his Variations for piano op. 27 are his best-known examples. Moreover, in his rigid music he is strongly influenced by medieval music, preceding composers such as Arvo Pärt. However, Webern's music is not as warm as Pärt's music, but colder and more distant. Webern creates a truly unique and new musical universe, which is why his is music is still exciting today.

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Alfred Schnittke

Alfred Schnittke was the son to German-Jewish father and Volga-German mother from Frankfurt am Main. His musical education started in 1946 in Vienna, where his father worked as a journalist and translator, and from 1948 he continued his studies in Moscow. From the 1970s, he would fully dedicate himself to composing. Schnittke's style was initially avant garde, strongly influenced by the Western composition techniques such as serialism and aleatorism. Like so many of his generation, Schnittke found these techniques to be unsatisfactory, and so he created his own style which he called polystylism, inspired by Charles Ives, Luciano Berio and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, but also Gustav Mahler,It is characterised by the parodic combinations of styles from different periods, by some recognised as postmodernism.

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Arnold Schönberg

Arnold Schoenberg was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, but perhaps also one of the least listened to. Strikingly, Schoenberg was self-educated, even though his music is imbedded in complex music theory. It was Schoenberg who definitely departed from tonality and he developed the twelve tone technique. In this composition style, one has to use every twelve tones of the scale, before one can be repeated. The struggle to adhere to this dogma is clearly audible: his music is tense, hectic and particularly acute - and therefore at times not that accesible to occasional listeners. Nevertheless, his music and his liberation of tonality had an enormous impact on all composers that came after him. Together with the...

Nevertheless, his music and his liberation of tonality had an enormous impact on all composers that came after him. Together with the music of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, his style is often referred to as the Second Viennese School, parallel to the First Viennese School of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, who, in a similar vein, changed the history of music for good.

His most performed works are his string sextet Verklärte Nacht, his five Orchestra pieces op. 16, and his opera Moses und Aron. The development of Schoenberg's music can be heard in his Five String Quartets in particular.

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