Bernd Alois Zimmermann

This disc brings together three pieces of occasional music by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970), the German composer best known for the opera Die Soldaten: a miniature ballet, music for a puppet theatre and a film score. Next to them stands the work that laid the ground for the "linguistic compositions" of his late period: the highly serialised cantata Omnia tempus habent. The light and the strict sides of the composer stand next to each other in 51 minutes.

Zimmermann was born in Bliesheim on 20 March 1918 and died on 10 August 1970. From the late 1940s until his appointment at the Cologne Musikhochschule in 1957 he wrote light music, arrangements and much work for radio, which is the background of the pieces here. The soprano Angelika Luz sings the cantata, and the Collegium Novum Zürich plays throughout under Peter Hirsch, who also conducts the Berlin recording of Zimmermann's Märchensuite in the same edition. The production is a coproduction with Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Swiss Radio DRS 2. In 1956 Zimmermann wrote that the borders of music can only be determined by composers, who try "to turn chaos into order, to encompass that which has no borders."

Un petit rien (1964) is "musique légère, lunaire et ornithologique" after Marcel Aymé's Les oiseaux de lune, for small ensemble, in seven tiny movements, from a lunar waltz and a lullaby for little birds who cannot sleep to a Boogie-Woogie au clair de lune. It was not heard until 1989, when the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Heinz Holliger gave the premiere in Berlin. Das Gelb und das Grün, music for a puppet theatre by Fred Schneckenburger, runs through a burlesque, a little waltz, a phantasmagoria and a march; members of the Hamburg radio orchestra under Winfried Zillig first played the suite in October 1952. Omnia tempus habent dates from 1957 and sets the Vulgate text of Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 for soprano and seventeen instruments. It is dedicated to Herbert Gericke, director of the German Academy in Rome, in thanks for a happy stay at the Villa Massimo, and Hans Rosbaud conducted the premiere in Cologne in 1958.

Metamorphose, the longest piece at 24 minutes, is music for small orchestra written for the film of the same name by the Swiss director and photographer Michael Wolgensinger, whom Zimmermann had known since 1952. The film sets images of Spanish scenes and landscapes side by side without commentary. Its six movements are cast in old and dance forms: introduction, invention, romanza, canon, habanera and gigue, with saxophone, electric guitar and percussion in the band.

CD, Wergo WER 6671 2, released in 2005 in the Edition Bernd Alois Zimmermann.