Trio

Hans Winterberg's Streichtrio from 1960 is one of the composer's most substantial chamber music works. On the one hand, he achieves a fascinating symbiosis of the most important tendencies of German-Austrian and Czech modernism in the first half of the 20th century; on the other, he takes a decisive step towards a tonal language in which the focus is no longer on harmonic-melodic complexity, but on the sensation of different tempo experiences occurring simultaneously. This path, which originated with Janácek,finally culminated in the works of the late 1960s, above all in Rhythmophonie for symphony orchestra, in which this compositional principle became the title. Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901 to a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, studied there with Alexander Zemlinsky and Alois Hába, among others. He survived the Shoah thanks to lucky coincidence and emigrated to Munich after the war, where he enjoyed a successful second career as a composer in the 1950s and 60s. The String Trio was recorded in 1962 by the members of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Angelika Rümann, Franz Schessl and Wilhelm Schneller in the Bavarian Radio studio. The Münchner Streichtrio played the world premiere coram publico in Esslingen in 1964.