Alte Musik Köln is a period music ensemble founded in 2006. The members of the ensemble,

successful Baroque and instrumental specialists in their own right, each contribute a unique

element to a particularly wide-ranging and harmonious whole. The successors to Musica

Antiqua Köln have already toured in Asia and North America. A further Asian tour will take them

to Korea and Japan. The present CD marks the beginning of a long-term cooperation with the

label ARS. On their first recording, Alte Musik Köln turn their attention to Felix Mendelssohn.

The well-known piano trios Op 49 and Op 66 represent the peak of Mendelssohn’s achievement

in his relatively small output of chamber music; both trios are similar in structure and mood,

beginning with a sombre and intense first movement, followed by a lyrical and melodic slow

movement; the third movement is a fleeting and magical scherzo and ending with an energetic

finale. In 1819 the ten-year-old Mendelssohn had begun taking music and composition lessons

with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin who made his pupils acquainted with the works of the Viennese

“Classicists”. This immediately bore fruit in the form of a trio for piano, violin and viola in C

minor, with its date of completion noted as 9.5.1820 and recorded here for the first time.