Trio Accanto & Eivind Buene
Biographie Trio Accanto & Eivind Buene
Trio Accanto
Consisting of Marcus Weiss (saxophone), Stefan Wirth (piano) and Christian Dierstein (percussion), Trio Accanto is a group of three internationally prominent soloists bound together by a unique approach to chamber music. The ensemble has been praised for its "mastery" and "world-class interpretations.”
The trio was originally founded in 1994 by Yukiko Sugawara, Marcus Weiss, and Christian Dierstein. From 2013 to 2025, the pianist of the ensemble was Nicolas Hodges. Since 2025, Stefan Wirth has joined the group as pianist.
The scoring of saxophone, piano, and percussion is common in jazz but was a rarity in classical music—leading to the description "a jazz trio that does not play jazz"—until Trio Accanto turned this situation around, stimulating close to one hundred composers to write new works over the years. Major figures such as Mark Andre, Georges Aperghis, Aldo Clementi, Michael Finnissy, Vinko Globokar, Georg Friedrich Haas, Toshio Hosokawa, Helmut Lachenmann, Brice Pauset, Rolf Riehm, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino, Martin Smolka, Christian Wolff, and Walter Zimmermann have contributed to the trio's repertoire, along with a substantial list of younger composers from around the world. A rigorous and increasingly broad-ranging programme of commissions continues, including works by Lisa Illean, Misato Mochizuki, Eivind Buene, Beat Furrer, Evan Johnson, and Mikel Urquiza.
Trio Accanto has performed at festivals in Donaueschingen, Witten, Darmstadt, Hanover, Cologne, Munich, Freiburg, Huddersfield, Basel, and Saarbrücken, as well as at Eclat (Stuttgart), Munich Biennale, Maerzmusik (Berlin), Salzburg Festival, Wien Modern, Tage für Neue Musik (Zurich), and further afield in Madrid, Seville, Chicago, Viitasaari (Finland), and at the Takefu Festival (Japan).
The trio's CD recordings have appeared on Kairos, HatHut, Edition Zeitklang, Assai, Verso, and Wergo. Recent releases on Wergo include Funambules, featuring music by Aperghis, Riehm, Schöllhorn, and Prins; Songs and Poems, featuring music by Clementi, Dohmen, Rihm, Thomalla, and Zimmermann; and other stories, featuring music by Finnissy, Kuwabara, Lachenmann, Schüttler, and Smolka. The most recent is a disc of music by Christian Wolff, featuring the half-hour Trio IX – Accanto, along with a group of recent Exercises, some also written especially for Trio Accanto. Future releases include Evan Johnson’s Plan and section of the same reservoir on the label Another Timbre, recorded after a series of performances in Autumn 2021.
