When Matthias Kessler (*1997), Luca Staffelbach (*1996), and Fabian Ziegler (*1995) play the works of French composers, they use up to two marimbas, three vibraphones, and two glockenspiels, sometimes more, sometimes less. The three musicians, all of whom hail from Switzerland and Austria, have dedicated five years of development work to their debut CD. The ensemble’s common denominator is a great desire to explore the infinite potential of percussion instruments.

Their bachelor’s degree courses at the University of the Arts in Zurich paved the way for the three young musicians to explore the entire spectrum of instrumental possibilities from the outset, and their mutual interest in their subject matter extended far beyond the huge variety of drums and other percussion instruments they had to hand, right up to the so-called “mallet instruments”.

Mallets are occasionally called beaters, and one usually plays marimbas and vibraphones with two of these implements in each hand. In the process of playing in this way, the percussion transcends its role as a pure rhythm instrument and emancipates itself as a fully-fledged, melodic, and tone-embellishing tool.

Mallet ensembles have now established themselves as an extremely popular genre in competitions and in the world of concert performances. Matthias Kessler, Luca Staffelbach, and Fabian Ziegler invariably receive an enthusiastic response at their concerts, where the audience is always impressed by the variety of these instruments they have at their disposal. In addition to the wealth of musical effects they utilise, the high level of synchronisation achieved by this young trio is astonishing, and it often appears to the untrained eye that everything one hears is being played by a single instrument.

These three young musicians would like this line-up to be taken ever more seriously in the future. The trio is planning that the musical focus should be less and less on a spectacular exotic status while concentrating more on the development of their musical quality and depth: “We hope that perhaps in five or ten years' time, people will come away from a marimba and vibraphone concert just as they would from a piano recital and not just say that was a sensational show,” is how Matthias puts into words the group’s aim for the future, something that, in turn, should also be reinforced by their current CD debut.