Paul Hindemith:
Trio No. 1 for violin, viola and cello, Op. 34
Trio No. 2 for violin, viola and cello (1933)

Arnold Schoenberg:
String Trio, Op. 45

Following their acclaimed recordings of the works for string trio by Mozart and Beethoven, Trio Zimmermannmake a great leap in time. Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith were both at the avant-garde epicentre of the 1910s and 1920s, but their future paths could hardly have been more different. Whereas Schoenberg would go on to have a decisive influence on twentieth-century modernism with his dodecaphonic music and the Second Viennese School, Paul Hindemithgradually renounced his rebellious early music, eventually becoming something of an anachronistic loner.

The relatively early String Trio No. 1(1924) already betrays the composer's interest in the forms and textures of baroque music. It opens with a flittering Toccata, going on to offer a contrapuntal web in its slow movement and ends with a double fugue. The contrapuntal textures are present also in the Second String Trio, but the neotonallanguage and general atmosphere point forward to later, large-scale works such as Mathis der Mahler.