Trio Fontenay
The Trio Fontenay was a piano trio founded in Hamburg in 1980 and existed until 2006 . In the founding formation it consisted of the pianist Wolf Harden (* 1962), the violinist Michael Mücke (* 1962) and the cellist Niklas Schmidt (* 1958). After Niklas Schmidt left in 1998, Jens Peter Maintz took over the cello part.
The trio chose their name for two reasons: on the one hand, the French name Fontenay is reminiscent of "Quelle" (French fontaine ), on the other hand, a street near the Hamburg University of Music , which was the first place where the ensemble practiced, bears this name. The ensemble took interpretative impulses from the Amadeus Quartet's courses in Cologne .
From the mid-1980s a concert career developed, during which the trio became permanent guests in the most important concert halls and at major festivals in Europe. In 1986 the American debut took place. After that, there were two major tours each year through the USA and Canada with regular appearances in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal. The repertoire of the ensemble included works from the entire piano trio literature from C. Ph. E. Bach and Joseph Haydn to compositions of new music.
The trio's discography includes recordings of all trios by Mozart , Schubert , Mendelssohn , Schumann , Dvořák and Brahms . For the complete recording of the Beethoven trios, the Trio Fontenay was awarded an annual prize by the German record critics .