Concerts in 2025
The next festival edition will take place from 1 February to 1 March 2025. The Bern Piano Trio will open the festival in the Zentrum Paul Klee.
We look forward to your visit!
Concerts in 2025
Concept
Concept
The "Piano Trio Fest" in Bern is the only piano trio festival in the world. It is therefore attracting increasing attention beyond the country's borders. Each festival edition sets new standards, and 2025 is no exception.
We look forward to fresh perspectives in the piano trio genre, continuing to embrace the classic trio formation (violin, cello, and piano) while fostering new sounds and ideas across historical and contemporary repertoires.
Highlights for 2025 include round anniversaries in French music, an evening featuring Bohuslav Martinů's two Concertinos for piano trio and string orchestra, the promotion of young talents and much more.
Two ensembles have not yet been determinated. Our partners, HKB and ORPHEUS Swiss Chamber Music Competition, will choose two groups through an independent selection process by the end of 2024. The only condition: talent and drive of the participants, who may play two other instruments in addition to the piano. Preference is given to female artists.
The "Piano Trio Fest" in Bern is the only piano trio festival in the world. It is therefore attracting increasing attention beyond the country's borders. Each festival edition sets new standards, and 2025 is no exception.
We look forward to fresh perspectives in the piano trio genre, continuing to embrace the classic trio formation (violin, cello, and piano) while fostering new sounds and ideas across historical and contemporary repertoires.
Highlights for 2025 include round anniversaries in French music, an evening featuring Bohuslav Martinů's two Concertinos for piano trio and string orchestra, the promotion of young talents and much more.
Two ensembles have not yet been determinated. Our partners, HKB and ORPHEUS Swiss Chamber Music Competition, will choose two groups through an independent selection process by the end of 2024. The only condition: talent and drive of the participants, who may play two other instruments in addition to the piano. Preference is given to female artists.
Commissioned composition
Commissioned composition
Right at the festival’s opening, audiences can expect a captivating musical dialogue spanning three continents. Charles Ives and Mikhail Glinka... do they fit together? While today’s world might say otherwise, art reveals other solutions. Swiss composer and jurist Rico Gubler acts as the arbiter, with his work being premiered by the Berner Klaviertrio at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in 2025.
The author himself describes it this way:
"The work, written for the historically rich combination of violin, cello, and piano, seeks to connect with this history using modern yet purely acoustic means. The work therefore also focuses on one of the classics of our cultural history, Shakespeare's Hamlet. Through the seven deaths in Shakespeare’s play, the associated emotional states and motives for action are explored as fundamental human drivers in a compositional form. This approach is both a nod to the romantic period of the piano trio’s heyday and a reflection of an enduring, timeless theme in humanity’s history—and likely its future as well.
The deaths of King Hamlet and Claudius frame the entire form and at the centre, as if it were an undramatic climax in terms of location and duration, is Ophelia's suicide. In a developed refrain form, the connected deaths of Hamlet and Laertes recur three times - interrupted by the death of Polonius and later of Gertrude.
For me personally, the return to these central emotional states and the reduction of the technical means, which have since multiplied, has a special appeal, since I had only dealt with the piano trio instrumentation once in my Viktor Suites (2000) and the compositions for piano quartet (1997) or string quartet (2001) are now decades ago."
Right at the festival’s opening, audiences can expect a captivating musical dialogue spanning three continents. Charles Ives and Mikhail Glinka... do they fit together? While today’s world might say otherwise, art reveals other solutions. Swiss composer and jurist Rico Gubler acts as the arbiter, with his work being premiered by the Berner Klaviertrio at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in 2025.
The author himself describes it this way:
"The work, written for the historically rich combination of violin, cello, and piano, seeks to connect with this history using modern yet purely acoustic means. The work therefore also focuses on one of the classics of our cultural history, Shakespeare's Hamlet. Through the seven deaths in Shakespeare’s play, the associated emotional states and motives for action are explored as fundamental human drivers in a compositional form. This approach is both a nod to the romantic period of the piano trio’s heyday and a reflection of an enduring, timeless theme in humanity’s history—and likely its future as well.
The deaths of King Hamlet and Claudius frame the entire form and at the centre, as if it were an undramatic climax in terms of location and duration, is Ophelia's suicide. In a developed refrain form, the connected deaths of Hamlet and Laertes recur three times - interrupted by the death of Polonius and later of Gertrude.
For me personally, the return to these central emotional states and the reduction of the technical means, which have since multiplied, has a special appeal, since I had only dealt with the piano trio instrumentation once in my Viktor Suites (2000) and the compositions for piano quartet (1997) or string quartet (2001) are now decades ago."
