Fonetica e Fonologia Stephan Shmidt

Starting from the magisterial trios of Beethoven and Brahms, clarinetist Daniel Ottensamer, cellist Stephan Koncz and pianist Christoph Traxler began a journey to explore the influences these works exerted on other composers. As they moved further and further away from their point of departure, their search took them through several centuries and across every continent and their project burgeoned into a comprehensive anthology. “Our initial idea was to juxtapose these mainstream works with contemporary pieces, but our work on this project eventually got so out of hand that there was no end to the works that we discovered for our ensemble,” Koncz explains. “In all of them the tonal variety of the clarinet and the interplay between the three instruments is explored in completely different ways.”

17th Century Wrocław (then Breslau) was one of Europe’s important musical centres. Its three main Protestant churches – St. Elisabeth, St. Mary Magdalene and St. Bernardine – collected extensive music libraries. Their repertoire was shaped both by prints imported from Italy and Germany, and by works composed by local cantors and organists employed in church ensembles. A separate collection of nearly 400 prints from 1610–55 remained in private hands. During World War II, however, they were taken away from the city and dispersed after 1945. Some items have not been found until now. The majority of the prints returned to Wrocław. Numerous manusripts were considered lost until the late 1980s, when they reappeared in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. They found their way there from Moscow, where some items of the former Breslau library still remain.