WERNER PIRCHNER (1940-2001): Piano Trios No. 1 “Wem gehört der Mensch...”, No. 2 “Heimat?” and No. 3 ”Heute... war Gestern Morgen. Heute... ist Morgen Gestern”.

Description: Pirchner was something of a maverick composer, with an early career as a jazz musician and a large output for stage and screen. He described his works as 'serious entertainment', which is apt. His cycle of piano trios deal with the weighty subjects that preoccupied the German Romantics, but in a lively vernacular vocabulary often inflected by jazz and naïve, childlike folk-like melody. The first trio, 'To whom does the Human Being Belong' deals with the individual's place in society, but this weighty subject is expressed in instantly accessible, even popular, terms, with syncopated jazzy rhythmic alacrity in scherzo passages, and jazz improvisation-like decoration to neo-baroque tradition. 'Heimat' is based on the composer's music for the stage, Romantic, folksong influenced episodes illustrating the tale of the national identity, and its dangers, in the life of a Jew living a precarious, initially idyllic life in Europe as the Nazis rose to power. The third trio is related to Pirchner's composition of the station identifiers for Austrian Radio's Ö1. The title, suggesting that 'Today was tomorrow yesterday', leads to optimistic, sometimes thoughtful, music, cheerfully communicative. Throughout, the composer's idiom is tonal, with a (very) few 'extended' effects. Eggner Trio.