Kaleidoskop (2010)

Austria's Eggner Trio -- Georg, Florian, and Christoph Eggner -- have concertized widely in mainstream repertoire. Here it presents three contemporary commissioned works, none of which is short on the usual accessibility. By Central European standards, it's a crowd-pleaser of a contemporary disc, with a general orientation toward tonal reference points. The title Kaleidoskop is appropriate, not only for the program as a whole, but for the individual works. All three seem to cycle through a variety of styles, but maintain an ... Read More

Austria's Eggner Trio -- Georg, Florian, and Christoph Eggner -- have concertized widely in mainstream repertoire. Here it presents three contemporary commissioned works, none of which is short on the usual accessibility. By Central European standards, it's a crowd-pleaser of a contemporary disc, with a general orientation toward tonal reference points. The title Kaleidoskop is appropriate, not only for the program as a whole, but for the individual works. All three seem to cycle through a variety of styles, but maintain an overall coherence. Gerrit Wunder's Sequentia Miraculi reflects the composer's background in film music with its four episodic movements, each evoking a different preexisting style. Johannes Berauer's Piano Trio No. 1 has hints of jazz, while the Seven Preludes with Prologue and Epilogue of Sascha Peres resemble Shostakovich in his more neo-classic moods and have similar shifts of tonal content between limpid Bachian melodies and spikier, more dissonant trio sounds. The Peres work... Read Less