Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Four orchestral works from the 1950s by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, music that deliberately links the heterogeneous and the non-simultaneous: tradition and new departures, light and serious music, form and ecstasy. The disc includes the world premiere of the Märchensuite, recorded live in January 2001, and the first recording of the ballet suite Alagoana. Caprichos Brasileiros.

Zimmermann was born on 20 March 1918 in Bliesheim, near Cologne, and died on 10 August 1970 in Königsdorf. He studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule with Philipp Jarnach and Heinrich Lemacher, and worked for Cologne radio on radio, film and stage music. The cellist Lucas Fels and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin play under Peter Hirsch. Discogs gives the recording as a live document of 20 and 21 January 2001 in the Großer Sendesaal of the Sender Freies Berlin. It is a coproduction with DeutschlandRadio and the Rundfunk Orchester und Chöre GmbH Berlin, produced by Rainer Pöllmann, with liner notes by Heribert Henrich and Hirsch.

The Märchensuite (1950) is a fairy-tale suite for large orchestra in seven movements, from a Prolog and a Musette through Der Ritt durch den Wald and Das verwunschene Schloss to a festive epilogue. Canto di speranza (1957), a cantata for cello and chamber orchestra in one span of almost twenty minutes, is the second version of a one-movement cello concerto, dedicated to the composer's wife. Siegfried Palm gave the first broadcast in 1958 with the Südwestfunk orchestra under Ernest Bour. The Impromptu (1958), eight minutes, was commissioned by the city of Cologne for a musicology congress, and Zimmermann himself conducted the Gürzenich-Orchester in the premiere. Alagoana, written between 1950 and 1955, is a ballet with Brazilian characters, Sertanejo and Caboclo among them. It was staged in Essen in December 1955, and a concert version followed in Baden-Baden in 1956 under Franz Waxman.

The production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award and, in 2003, the Coup de Cœur Musique Contemporaine of the Académie Charles Cros. It belongs to the Edition Bernd Alois Zimmermann on Wergo.

CD, Wergo WER 6656 2, released in 2002, 75 minutes.