TIDEWATER TIMES – JUNE 2022 ISSUE
Written by James Carder
Pictured is Trio Colores, winner of both the $10,000 Lerman Gold Prize and the $500 Audience Choice Award at the April 2022 Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals. The trio will return to perform on Friday, June 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Easton’s Ebenezer Theater as part of the 2022 Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival.
Trio Colores, winner of both the $10,000 Lerman Gold Prize and the $500 Audience Choice Award at the April 2022 Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals, will return to perform on Friday, June 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Easton’s Ebenezer Theater as part of the 2022 Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival. This youthful, energetic all-percussion ensemble – comprised of Fabian Ziegler, Luca Stafffelbach, and Matthias Kessler – has programmed two contemporary works by Thierry De Mey and Christos Hatzis and arrangements of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin and Milhaud’s Scaramouche for this year’s Festival.
These award-winning musicians regularly perform as soloists and as members of symphonic orchestras. Since 2017, they have joined forces as the virtuosic Trio Colores and delighted audiences with innovative percussive chamber music. Their trio repertoire consists both of modern percussion masterpieces, as well as arrangements of classical works, such as Staffelbach’s arrangement of Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre for marimbas and vibraphone that wowed both jurists and audience members alike at the recent Competition. They state their performance goal, as a trio, is “to captivate audiences with the fresh, nuanced sound possibilities of percussion instruments and, above all else, with the trio’s virtuosic energy and sheer joy of performing.” They also hope their music, “challenges traditional performance boundaries and provides an ambitious, uniquely designed, and thoroughly entertaining concert program.”
The Swiss-born Ziegler and Staffelbach and the Austrian-born Kessler all gravitated to percussion instruments as children. They each received a Bachelor of Arts in Music degree from the prestigious Zurich University of the Arts. Ziegler continued his studies there to receive the Master of Arts in Music degree (performance soloist). Staffelbach also continued to study percussion performance there pursuing a Master of Arts in Music Pedagogy (instrumental music pedagogy – classical). Kessler was awarded a two-year scholarship in 2019 at the famous Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and in January this year was named the Principal Timpanist of the Hamburg Symphony.
Staffelbach is especially engaged in the creative process of composing and arranging for percussion, and many of his arrangements are performed by the Trio Colores. He summed up the trio’s enthusiasm for percussion, stating, “We percussionists, in particular, have the privilege that our instruments are represented in an unbelievably large number of cultural areas in a variety of forms. A diversity that invites you to constantly penetrate and explore other musical genres and forms of music. This is the main drive of my musical work and will always lead me to new paths in my future.”
Program selections are subject to change. For further details on the 2022 Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival and to purchase tickets, visit https://chesapeakemusic.org/.
