Walter Zimmermann

Piano music written by Walter Zimmermann between 2001 and 2006, played by Nicolas Hodges. At its centre is Voces abandonadas (2005/06), a work of nearly forty minutes built on the aphorisms of the Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia. Around it are five shorter pieces, among them one for piano and toy piano and one for the left hand alone. Zimmermann's music here is introverted and often hesitant, with no use for turbulent atmospheres or emphatic forms.

Zimmermann was born in Schwabach, Franconia, on 15 April 1949. He found his place apart from the avant-garde currents of Darmstadt and Cologne. In search of simplicity he turned away from the neo-expressionist tendencies of the 1970s and looked instead to the individualism of American composers and the diatonic early works of John Cage. His impulses come from ancient myth, Renaissance symbolism, philosophy, literature and the visual arts. The recording is a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, with liner notes by Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer.

For Zimmermann the piano is a laboratory for his methods. Voces abandonadas is a counterpart to Beginner's Mind (1975), which drew on Shunryū Suzuki and Zen. In his words, "the entire book with its two volumes has been translated into 514 piano 'sentences'", most lasting a bar or less, or a single fermata. They follow one another without pause, in the order of the books. The two parts are dedicated to Helmut Lachenmann at seventy and Morton Feldman at eighty. Blaupause (2003) and Blueprint (2004) are a pair, the second a negative of the first, with pitches where the other has rests. The Missing Nail at the River (2003/04) has the pianist move quickly between the two instruments. Romanska Bågar (2004), for the left hand, draws on a poem by Tomas Tranströmer about a Romanesque church. Aimide (2001/02) closes the disc in three parts: Cura, Fuga and Svara, the last using melodic fragments from Vedic chant.

In MusicWeb International, Gary Higginson called the music "highly individual and remarkably mesmeric". Andrew Clements in Gramophone wrote that Voces abandonadas challenges the assumption that narrative fluidity is a necessary compositional virtue.

CD, Wergo WER 7356 2, released in 2016.