Tobias PM Schneid teaches music theory at the University of Würzburg, has won international awards, and is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. But the habitus of the elitist avant-garde composer is foreign to him. The former student of Heinz Winbeck has found his own distinctive voice. He has never submitted to dogma. His music is a space of freedom, knows no blinders, and draws on influences from jazz and rock as well as the achievements of the avant-garde. And, as the works on this album show, it repeatedly seeks dialogue with the past.
Schneid ventures into the terrain of inner turmoil in String Quartet No. 3 »Schumann« with the help of quotations, particularly from Schumann's late work, which was written under the influence of his mental illness.
Unlike in the Schumann Quartet, specifically identifiable quotations play only a minor role in Piano Trio No. 3 »Amadé«” Instead, the conceptual center here is a letter Mozart wrote to his father in 1787.
In Piano Trio No. 4 »Testament« Schneid touched on the one hand on the “lamentation over Beethoven's fateful hearing loss and the social isolation associated with it,” and on the other hand on the “references to a hopeful potential for strength that wrestles fate for its own right to exist.” Similarly, the trio (dedicated to the memory of Heinz Winbeck) developed into a “work about failure and the courage to repeatedly counter this failure with a spirited new beginning.”
Among the works on this album, String Trio No. 2 »Pas de Trois« plays a special role in that it is the only one that does not seek dialogue with the past, but rather focuses on dialogue itself. If Goethe defines the string quartet as a place where “four reasonable people converse,” then Schneid's string trio is a place where three people talk past each other.