“Trio Catch are like a fresh new brand for the old lady New Music.” (www.vanmagazin.com) Could there be a catchier way of phrasing it? Arnold Schönberg was not averse to the occasional catchy phrase, either, when he wrote that Brahms had put “new wine into old bottles”. The latter’s Clarinet Trio op. 114, written in 1891, is at the centre of this album. The composer Bernhard Lang refers directly to Brahms in his Monadologie XXVII, as he extrapolates cells from the trio in a kind of mechanical adaptation. And the piece from which the album takes its title, Sanh, written by the late, lamented Alsatian composer Christophe Bertrand, is a world premiere recording. The Chinese word “san” to which the title refers means “three” or, as a verb, “to scatter”.
