Academy
Coaches 2025
Trio Accanto
Chamber Music, Coach
Marcus Weiss saxophone
Nicolas Hodges piano
Christian Dierstein percussion
Trio Accanto was founded in 1994 and consists of Marcus Weiss (saxophone), Nicolas Hodges (piano) and Christian Dierstein (percussion). This group of three internationally renowned soloists, united by a unique approach to chamber music, has been praised for its "mastery" and "world-class interpretations". The instrumentation of saxophone, piano and percussion is common in jazz, but was a rarity in classical music (leading to the description "a jazz trio that doesn't play jazz") until Trio Accanto reversed this situation, inspiring more than a hundred composers to write new works over the years. Important composers 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, as well as many younger composers from all over the world. A rigorous and increasingly wide-ranging program of commissioned works 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, Graz and Saarbrücken, as well as at Eclat (Stuttgart), the Munich Biennale, Maerzmusik (Berlin), the Salzburg Festival, Wien Modern, the Tage für Neue Musik (Zurich) and also in Madrid, Seville, Chicago, Viitasaari (Finland), Graz and at the Takefu Festival (Japan).
The trio's CD recordings have been released by Kairos, HatHut, Edition Zeitklang, Assai, Verso and Wergo. Recent releases on Wergo include "Funambules" with music by Aperghis, Riehm, Schöllhorn and Prins, "Songs and Poems" with music by Clementi, Dohmen, Rihm, Thomalla and Zimmermann and "other stories" with music by Finnissy, Kuwabara, Lachenmann, Schüttler and Smolka. The most recent release is a CD of music by Christian Wolff, which includes the half-hour "Trio IX - Accanto" as well as a series of more recent exercises, some of which were also written especially for Trio Accanto. Future releases include Evan Johnson's "Plan and Section of the same reservoir" on the Another Timbre label, recorded after a series of performances in the fall of 2021.
