Trio Accanto
Chamber ensemble | Germany | founded 1994
About Trio Accanto
Trio Accanto was formed in 1994 by three internationally prominent soloists united by a distinctive approach to chamber music, and has been praised for its “mastery” and “world class interpretations”. The line-up of saxophone, piano and percussion is common in jazz but was a rarity in classical music, leading to the description “a jazz trio that does not play jazz”, until Trio Accanto changed that, inspiring more than one hundred composers to write new works.
Major figures such as Georges Aperghis, Aldo Clementi, Michael Finnissy, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Toshio Hosokawa, Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino and Christian Wolff have contributed to the repertoire, along with many younger composers from around the world.
The trio has appeared at festivals in Donaueschingen, Witten, Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Basel and Stuttgart, as well as the Munich Biennale, Maerzmusik in Berlin, the Salzburg Festival and Wien Modern, and further afield in Madrid, Chicago and Japan.
Its recordings include Funambules (2016), Songs and Poems (2018), Other stories (2020), a disc of music by Christian Wolff (2021) and, most recently, Out into the open (2026), with music by Furrer, Pauset, Mochizuki and Saunders. In 2022 the trio also recorded Evan Johnson’s Plan and section of the same reservoir.
