Musicians Isabel Gehweiler and Fiona Hengartner wishes to make lesser-known classical works accessible to a wide audience through innovative concert concepts and programs.
During the 2021-2022 season, the duo undertook a concert tour through Switzerland entitled "Sounds and Words - A Path to Freedom?", a program that combines philosophy and music. Through short recitations and forgotten musical works by Julius Röntgen and Heinrich von Herzogenberg, contemporaries of Brahms, the project proposes a path to re-negotiate one's intellectual and emotional freedom.
Being curious about the mechanisms that allow a composer to permanently enter the repertoire and to measure the consequences of an androcentric vision of musical creation, the Duo is working together with the Department of Musicology of the University of Fribourg to reflect on the definition of the canon in a roundtable discussion. This discussion is embellished with musical vignettes to make people discover the works of Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Amanda Maier (-Röntgen), talented composers even more forgotten than their husbands.
On its 2022-2023 concert tour, the Duo will present a program of French and Swiss inspiration featuring key pieces from the cello and piano repertoire, transcriptions as well as unknown masterpieces by forgotten composers. The musicians will also perform a sonata by the Swiss composer Martin Wendel in a concert at the Central Library in Zurich in 2023, in order to promote music that has never been recorded before.
In 2024, their first CD "Notre amour" is released on the German label Solo Musica, featuring a selection of works by Swiss and French composers. This programme resonates with the emotions associated with love in all its diversity, whether romantic, friendly, familial, unconditional or spiritual. It celebrates the complexity and beauty of this feeling that transcends time and culture.