A symphony orchestra and a large choir are confronted with a big band, and all three are put into perspective by historic footage of their predecessors in concert and rehearsal from the first decades of public TV. A game of identity, style, and time, remixing the newly digitalized radio archives and celebrating the three traditional musical pillars of the major European radio stations. All used material was found in the Southwest German Radio archives, the only exception being footage of a wax cylinder recording from 1888 with the world’s first recording of a large orchestra and a choir. The piece was co-commissioned by Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and premiered in Donaueschingen on 18 October 2019. TRIO is made up entirely by little video clips cut out from footage found at the Southwest German Radio television and film archives, mostly documentations of concerts or rehearsals, both with the in-house symphony orchestra, big band and choir and with visiting ensembles and conductors. 

Most of the time the three live-ensembles and the archive-clips (with a historic representation of either of the three ensembles) are not mixed/superimposed but are treated as six different states of the music or rather three individual instruments with each their unique voice, sound and identity, sometimes live, sometimes historic, in an extreme version of so-called “broken instrumentation”. In this manner the music is freely moving around between sounds, styles and identities and skipping back and forth in time. The video gives life to the anecdotes and contain little stories of their own, but above all they serve to clearly show the “historical time”: we can immediately identify the timely distance of the images and hence also the recordings, not only through the quality and the black&white, but also from the looks, the people, the clothing, the behaviours, the whole culture surrounding the concert and rehearsal situations. And very importantly: the video creates the feeling of musical communication between the live ensembles and their colleagues from the past. In the piece there are several clips with spoken text in German. At a live performance the video is supertitled with an English translation. The translated texts are inserted below with an indication of the time where they occur: 

[12:04, Svend Asmussen:] Unfortunately, Ulrich, I have a feeling that we are only allowed to present something truly valuable here. So, not as usual. In other words, a violin solo, and a piece that everybody knows and likes.
[15:03, Voice:] 5 seconds ... Attention ... Ladies and Gentlemen, Southern Radio Stuttgart presents a film about itself: what do radio and television look like behind the scenes?
[Voice:] One of the noises that the assistants searched for this morning will now be played back.
[Producer 1:] Play the noise!
[Producer 2:] Stop the film!
[17:12, Solti:] It sounds a bit harsh for my taste, but we will get there. Yes, piano, but a singing piano, a speaking piano. So bar 16 ... “dead” piano only rarely. That exists too, but not here. Bar 16, strings only.
[20:30, Kleiber:] If you think da-da-da-di-di-di-ba-ba-bam-bam, it’s not good. Here’s the ra-ba-ba-ba-ba side and here’s the ba-ba-bam-ba side. This schizophrenic mix: now it’s sad, now it’s funny. Don’t you forget it. I will certainly forget it, but you won’t forget it. When you hear it, it’s really funny. 2 before 19.
[22:18, Repeated and alternated between choir and young Celibidache:]
Back, back, back!
Too sharp, too sharp, the A!
Shhh!
Distant!
Nothing, Resigned!
Distant, distant!
No!
No, relaxed!
But use my upbeat...
No, that’s not it, gentlemen. It’s not relaxed. You’re going BUH!
Much too tense. Relax! (edited)
[Young Celibidache + Choir:] Too harsh, too harsh. Dolcissimo! Tempo, tempo! Don’t use the frog [of the bow]. Tempo, tempo! Back, back! Nothing, nothing at all! Nothing at all! Nothing at all! Second violin, stay underneath the first! Too much, too much bow! Nothing at all, nothing at all! Astonished! Audible bow change ... Too much, too mu—
[Sings] Yes. Stay epic, gentlemen. Not so passionate. [Sings] Narratively.
Simple, plain. [Sings]
Unfortunately, it ended up this way. Yes, we ma—... who knows what we promise? Number, please. Nobody? Again, then. That would also be healthy for the beginning. More delicate, please. Delicate. Beautiful now, violins, please!
[27:38, Hermann Scherchen:] Right? Electronic music is nothing to this. He’s already done it all, this Mr. Beethoven.
[37:31, Announcer:] The work you are about to hear, played by our South Radio Symphony Orchestra ...
[Interviewer 1:] Mr. Dr. Gottwald, you know this work very well: how does this peculiar juxtaposition of very modern and very traditional music arise?
[Old Celibidache:] There’s memory, there are connections to the past, there’s knowledge, hope, and so on.
[Old Boulez, dubbed by speaker:] We find ourselves in a centenaryarchive with music libraries similar to text libraries.
[Voice:] In the sound archive the productions are preserved and catalogued.
In the film archive there are a number of valuable sound documents and curiosities.
Here the film and the sound are cut and glued together. Here the film is obtaining its form ...
[Interviewer 2:] But how does it sound, then? Well ...
[Interviewer 1:] We want to try and examine the peculiarity of this work ...
[Interviewer 2:] It stands out immediately that the orchestra has a different setup than one is used to with a symphony orchestra ...
[Voice:] A concept in which three orchestras with three conductors ...
[Gielen:] The effort necessary to realize this piece is so immense that only an institution with the power of a German radio station is able to carry it out ...
[Speaker 1:] The development of this peculiar manner of dissemination of human culture shows what this union of technology and spirit is all about.
[Speaker 2]: Watching and listening a lot, but saying very little, is always useful and good...
[Interviewer 3:] How is it with the audience: must a listener be a specialist in order to listen to a such music?
[Gielen:] On the contrary, he should just be open to what he doesn’t yet know.
[Interviewer 3:] But he is having difficulties with this.
[Gielen:] Oh, that’s perfectly possible...
[Voice:] Here there exists a society for New Music and an audience that confronts its particular set of difficulties with an open mind.
[Voice:] The Donaueschingen Days of Contemporary Music ...
[Old Boulez:] History goes on and will, retrospectively, not end in obscurity, but will always stand in a close relationship with its respective time period.
[Interviewer 4:] Are you lamenting that there are no longer scandals surrounding your premieres, compared to before?
[Penderecki:] Yes, I think people have already had enough of New Music. The golden times are already gone, unfortunately.
[Dr. Gottwald:] The choirs no longer have any texts, so they have to make do with phonemes. I think it is advisable to play this small piece on tape...