Trio Catch

Unity in Diversity

Trio Catch: A Portrait

Annette Zerpner

Clarinet, cello, and piano—as attractive as it is unusual, this combination of a flexible wind instrument, the mellifluous tone of the cello, and the versatility of the piano inspired three young musicians to found an ensemble ten years ago. With his famous A-minor Trio Op. 114, Johannes Brahms left a lasting musical monument to this combination of instruments. Did that work provide the initial spark for Trio Catch? Boglárka Pecze, the Hungarian-born clarinetist, shakes her head. Everything began when the three were fellows of the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt in 2009, with a composition by Helmut Lachenmann. The trio eventually took its name from a piece by the British composer Thomas Adès: in his 1991 work Catch, a classical piano trio with violin and cello “captures” a clarinet. It was a catch that has proven fruitful: “There is much more interest in our combination of instruments, both from composers and from audiences, than you might think,” Pecze says.

She and the Swiss cellist Eva Boesch—who joined the trio in 2013—are on a rehearsal break for a workshop concert at Berlin’s Radialsystem. The two musicians discuss the work of their ensemble, which also includes Korean pianist Sun-Young Nam, and their unusual repertoire, which they are continuously expanding. Although they do perform Brahms, of course, as well as Beethoven’s “Gassenhauer” Trio or a mid–19th century work by the French composer Louise Farrenc, music of the 20th and 21st centuries is at the center of their activities. Several of these works were commissioned and premiered by Trio Catch. But nothing could be further from their minds than compartmentalizing—rather, their familiarity with contemporary music and its extended sonic possibilities opened their “classical” ears as well, they explain. “You discover and dare to do things you would never have imagined before,” Pecze is convinced.

The Hamburg-based trio is performing at the Pierre Boulez Saal for the first time. When it comes to the subtlest nuances of sound, a concert hall takes on the role of a fourth ensemble member: “Each space has its own resonance, to which the individual instruments respond with different degrees of openness. There are halls where the overall balance is just right from the very beginning. Elsewhere, you might have to reduce one instrument’s sound, as a whole or in specific registers, and experiment until everything is right.” Surprises are part of the process. “You have to actually be on stage yourself. What might seem huge in a photograph may suddenly feel quite intimate. That actually happened to us at the Elbphilharmonie. The distance from any seat in the hall to the center of the stage is short.” The ellipsis of the Pierre Boulez Saal ensures even greater proximity between musicians and audience.

No matter the space, the trio constellation mirrors the basic situation of any concert, as the performers describe it: “Music is always about three people—one who conceives and writes it down, one who reads and interprets it, and one who listens and reacts.” Quite often, the complex contemporary works interpreted by Trio Catch pose special challenges for the untutored—and even for the more experienced— ear. The ensemble’s answer to this is a series of workshop concerts they have been presenting under the title Ohrknacker (literally, “ear-cracker”) for several years now, opening ears and music to each other, so to speak. “Before world premieres, we have always enjoyed playing private house concerts, to see how it feels to perform a new work.” The Ohrknacker concerts expand this idea: “We talk about our personal relationship with the pieces, about the stories behind them, emphasizing certain passages and pointing out special playing techniques and sounds. Often, the audience then immediately asks to hear the work again.” The more one knows, the more one hears, gaining a better understanding of the reasons why the three musicians are fascinated by the compositions written for them. In this context, Eva Boesch compares the ensemble to a small orchestra: “We have a wind and a string section and an entire harmony and percussion section in the piano. Finding the right mix of these different sound colors—that’s the challenge. Their diversity is often very attractive, but sometimes we also try to assimilate the sounds to such an extent that you can no longer tell which instrument is playing. To reach this level, you have to know each other very well and have played together for many years.”

One good example for this kind of mutual imitation of the three instruments is the opening piece of tonight’s program, the Catch Sonata written three years ago for the ensemble by French composer Gérard Pesson. It requires the piano to be prepared with tuning wedges—and French clothes-pins. As Eva Boesch points out, these produce a particular good sound, as they have a rubber coating that also prevents the piano strings from being damaged. “They sometimes make the instrument sound like a gamelan orchestra or a drum,” Boesch explains. “This sound blends well with my cello pizzicato, for example when I pluck the strings behind the bridge. It is an incredibly colorful, very delicate idiom that often does not sound like our three instruments at all but resembles something unearthly.” The trio has frequently performed Pesson’s Sonata in places where the audience is less accustomed to contemporary music: “The piece is written in a style that is particularly accessible, comprehensible, and elegant.”

Pesson’s work is followed by a piece by the late-Romantic composer Paul Juon, an artist still awaiting rediscovery. Born in Moscow to Swiss parents, he studied in his hometown and in Berlin, where he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in 1906. In 1934, he retreated to Switzerland. Contemporary reviews show that his chamber music works in particular were frequently performed to highly positive reactions during the first decades of the 20th century. His entertainingly diverse, dance - -like Trio Miniatures, published collectively as opus numbers 18 and 24, started out as compositions for four-hand piano. Trio Catch enjoys a close collaboration with Johannes Boris Borowski and Josef Maria Staud, and both their works heard tonight were written for the ensemble. Borowski’s As if of 2017 owes its title to a line from Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, which begins, “As if I could or would…” The “as if” signifies a certain distance, expressed in subtle wit and bantering between the instruments as well as alienated, shifted harmonies: clarinet and cello intermittently play in quarter-tone intervals here. The piece is also extremely complex in terms of rhythm.

On the occasion of the world premiere of As if, Borowski praised the musicians: “They feel a high degree of responsibility for every kind of music they perform—no matter the composer. That is quite rare.” The trio has no clear-cut answer to the question of how they might describe an ideal collaboration with a composer: “Some of them don’t like performers to have a say in the artistic process—then the result is a piece that is completely finished and polished when we get to see it. Others expressly encourage exchange. We always try to intuit what the composer needs from us.” While some composers find it essential to “sweat out” a new work at the very last moment—which is not exactly easy on the performers’ nerves—others approach them with sketches and notes even before getting down to the actual work of composing, in order to try out ideas, take inspiration from what they hear, and then return after months with a completed score. The genesis of a composition is no less individual than the person writing it. “The beauty of playing works by living composers is that you can ask any question or discuss passages that might be technically or musically unclear. Then, ideally, you search for a solution together, which can be very satisfying for both sides,” Boesch says.

Johannes Maria Staud’s Wasserzeichen (Auf die Stimme der weißen Kreide II) is part of a series of works, referencing in its subtitle a composition for larger ensemble written in 2014–5. The piece has a highly impulsive character and contains a series of multiphonics in the clarinet part, Pecze explains. It also includes virtuoso passages for bass clarinet, making full use of that instrument’s tonal range as well as extreme demands on the player’s technique. To Pecze, the bass clarinet has long been a natural part of her musical means of expression. For some time now, she has also explored playing the basset horn, which she values for its combination of clarinetspecific flexibility and the sound of its low register.

“There are so many new works for our combination of instruments that we hardly ever have the feeling of playing any one work too often,” Pecze sums up. The ensemble’s debut at the Pierre Boulez Saal thus offers not only a sample of Trio Catch’s current repertoire, but also provides ample opportunity for the three musicians to show off the