Reto Bieri (clarinet), Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Polina Leschenko (piano)

The basic idea of this album was to play in threes... Not to play 'something', but to experiment 'in threes' with sound worlds as different as those of Bartok, Poulenc and Schoenfield. With his Contrastes, composed in 1938 for Benny Goodman, Bartok broadened his penchant for traditional music and turned it into a more universal work, influenced by jazz. Poulenc was a child of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, influenced as much by Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie as by cabaret songs and operetta. Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit in 1947, also likes to combine styles. Each of the movements in his trio is based on an Eastern European Hasidic melody...not forgetting the breathtaking klezmer dances of Romanian Serban Nichifor. Almost ten years after Take 2(Alpha211), Patricia Kopatchinskaja reunites with two great accomplices, clarinettist Reto Bieri and pianist Polina Leschenko, for a programme based around trios that celebrate the roots of these three musicians.

"[The playing] can affectionately embrace the whimsical to the manner born, but equally bristles with spellbinding virtuosity, compelling insight and crests a lifeforce carrying all before it." - BBC Music Magazine, February 2024