CDs
Hotel Tango (2023)
Where does tango come from and how many people and cultures have been captivated by its rhythms, song, and dance?
Our project aims to express the enormous breadth of the genre through a selection of pieces, each with a unique story, all of which are influenced by tango. A kind of international tango parade, this album takes our listeners from Parisian salons to the small streets of Buenos Aires, through the United States and Eastern Europe. Many of the works we present are stories within stories, paying homage to earlier works in the form of arrangements and transcriptions.
This program is very personal: we present a new version of Piazzolla’s Four Seasons, created by our own clarinetist, Ž. Brazauskas and a commissioned work, “Foxtrot Romeo Juliet Hotel Tango” by J. Hoffman alongside mazurkas and contradanzas, themselves predecessors of tango. Stravinsky’s iconic “Tango” coexists with with Ravel’s “Pièce en Forme de Habanera” and the concept of tango reveals itself to be malleable, as its rhythms and harmonies are explored and reimagined.
We‘d like to share our own fascination with an art form which has thrived for a century and a half, and which continues to shape us, just as we shape it, today.
Funded by Neustart Kultur Ensemble program.
CONNECTING IDENTITIES (2020)
2018 marked the 100 year anniversary of restored Lithuania. However, this shouldn’t be confused with 100 years of freedom for the country; the region saw its territory go back and forth, claimed by Germany, Poland and Russia until, in 1990, Lithuania declared independence from the USSR. The country lies neatly along the fault lines between east and west, and bears the scars of many political earthquakes, while also offering a unique cultural reservoir formed by its geopolitical landscape.
We have recorded a project which means a lot to our trio: a programme celebrating the richness of Lithuanian heritage, folklore, history, tradition, and diversity, along with the richness of what transpired on that territory. The three of us have different backgrounds converging around Lithuania; we all have family members born and buried there. Each of our families made the country its home, while also belonging to different groups: to the Lithuanian ethnicity, but also to the Jewish, Polish, and Russian ones.
For this reason, we wanted to record a programme as multifaceted and varied as our own experience, while delving into the essence of the land and its people. We commissioned five composers to write works for us, three dealing specifically with the Lithuanian tradition of the Sutartinė, a folk song which belongs to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, but with drastically different stylistic approaches. The other two works go in a different direction; one delves into the contemporary Lithuanian musical landscape, and the other explores the history of forced Lithuanian labour in Siberia.
These five works, commissioned and premiered in 2018 to celebrate 100 years of restored Lithuania; ultimately honour Lithuania’s 30 years of true independence, a tribute to a country that is both remarkably young and truly ancient.
YOUTH (2017)
When we were approached by the wonderful Quandt family with the idea of recording a CD, we realized that we are all around Beethoven’s age when he composed his Gassenhauer Trio. As our ensemble itself is young, and as this recording is our debut, we decided to explore the concept of youth. Beethoven wrote his Gassenhauer Trio with the flexible instrumentation that allowed the newly emerging clarinet or the violin to take the higher line. Coupled with the cello, this provides a counterpart to the two voices of the piano. With this flexibility in mind, we allowed ourselves to choose from a wide spectrum of trios, without limiting our repertoire to original compositions for clarinet-cello-piano. As the culmination of half a year’s intense and exhilarating work, we are excited to present Trio Agora’s first recording, “Youth.”
We took the idea of allowing room for experimentation as a starting point, and created a pairing of youthful works designed to re-contextualize, enrich, and even surprise our listeners. Each composer’s journey was unique, but the common thread is that all five worked within the musical fabric he had absorbed as a child, and sought to establish a new path for himself as an adult.
This idea of searching liberated and challenged us to find new ways to adapt the music to our ensemble. Working with composer Joel Hoffman as an artistic advisor, we set out to re-envision youthful classics, and bring lesser-known works to the stage.