Wolfgang Rihm is best known as a composer of operas (his recent and recently recorded Die Eroberung von Mexico—CPO C CPO999 185-2— is an impressive achievement) and it's not hard to hear a musical dramatist at work in his chamber music. In this piece his title (''Distant Scenes'') makes obvious reference to more than one work by Schumann, but it also (fremde means ''foreign'' or ''alien'' as well) stresses his remoteness; the subtitle is not ''piano trio'', but ''attempts for piano trio''. What Rihm is aiming at, if I read the rather impenetrable notes correctly, is a music that at one and the same time evokes Schumann as one of the composers he feels closest to, but also recaptures the wildness, the unpredictability, that must have disconcerted Schumann's first audiences.
To achieve that one would have to handle one's Schumannesque material with the boldness of a Schumann who had experienced the twentieth century, and that indeed is what Rihm's 'attempts' are about. In his third piece, for example, the 'Schumann' idea is halfway between a song and a funeral march. It soon takes on more-than-Schumannesque, Mahlerian features before it is attacked by brutal repeated-note gestures and perhaps defended by passionate post-romantic ones. The repeated notes win, however, and the piece ends enigmatically. At other times the glances at the past are more sidelong. In the first piece pianistic figurations closer to Schumann's accompaniments than to his melodies, plus harmonies that in their plainness refer to no very specific period, give rise to grandly rhetorical 'neo-tonal' outbursts. The simplest but also the oddest piece is the middle one, where the presence of Schumann is almost constant, indeed at times it sounds very like him, but his appearances are invariably the cue for unexpected shifts and underminings, violent juxtapositions and again those brutal repeated notes. The conclusion is another flamboyantly histrionic outburst and a still twitching but undeniably dead coda.
Rihm's 'own' music, where the aid of Schumann is not sought, is strong, coherent despite abrupt discontinuities, often eloquent; each of the three pieces is clearly if enigmatically plotted (one of his stated objectives is to write music that is both clear and puzzling). The work is oratory rather than chamber music, and the performances are appropriately big-featured; the recording is clean and forward.'