Johann Sebastian Bach, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Thomas Demenga, Thomas Zehetmair, Christoph Schiller

This is the fourth volume of the ECM New Series cycle in which cellist Thomas Demenga sets Johann Sebastian Bach's cello suites, one per album, beside music of the twentieth century. Here the Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, meets the three unaccompanied sonatas of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, for violin, viola and cello. The links run deep, since Zimmermann's sonatas draw openly on Bach, from a B-A-C-H cipher to a Lutheran chorale.

Demenga plays the Bach and the Cello Sonata of 1960. The Violin Sonata of 1951 is played by Thomas Zehetmair, and the Viola Sonata of 1955 by Christoph Schiller, in his first New Series appearance. The recordings were made in February and July 1995 at Tonstudio Teije van Geest in Sandhausen, with Teije van Geest as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. The earlier volumes, the third of which held the First Suite, paired Bach with Heinz Holliger, Elliott Carter and Sándor Veress.

Demenga calls the Violin Sonata a twelve-tone homage to Bach, with arpeggios and repeated open strings "quite intentionally reminiscent of J.S. Bach's E Major partita". It moves from a meditative Prelude to a strict closing Toccata built on the letters of Bach's name. The single-movement Viola Sonata carries the dedication ...an den Gesang eines Engels (to the song of an angel), after the death of the composer's infant daughter Barbara in 1955. Zimmermann called it a chorale prelude, and Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ emerges in its pure form only near the end. The Cello Sonata, long held to be unplayable, layers several tempos at once in its five short movements, from Rappresentazione to Versetto.

Reviewing the disc in BBC Music Magazine, Helen Wallace called it "a model of creative programming" and wrote that "Zehetmair gives a strong reading of the sultry Violin Sonata". On ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo noted that Demenga approaches the Bach almost like a viola da gamba player, most strikingly in the Courante. On ECM's page Demenga recalls that Zimmermann called himself, throughout his life, a "very Rhenish mixture of monk and Dionysian".

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1571, first released in May 1996, with a 28-page booklet of notes in German, English and French.