Chamber Music

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s chamber music oeuvre is indicative of a composer who at first attempted to reproduce the development of new music from which German composers were mostly separated during the Nazi regime. At the end of the 1950s he developed his own compositional style, the pluralistic “Klangkomposition”, a method which focuses on planes – or areas – of sound and tone-colours, often including elements of Jazz. Zimmermann explained as follows: “Past, present and future are, as you know, bound to the procedure of successiveness merely by their appearance as cosmic time. In our cognitive reality, however, this succession does not exist, possessing a truer reality than the well-acquainted clock, which basically indicates nothing else then the fact that there is no presence in a strict sense. Time bends itself into a spherical shape. From within this notion, […] I developed my […] pluralistic compositional technique, which takes the multiple layers of our reality into account”.

At the centre of the concert are two large-scale works which both display Zimmermann’s immense stylistic range: the satirical “Rheinischen Kirmestänze” for 13 wind instruments is a grotesque burlesque-like marching band pastiche, while the pale sound world of the late work “Stille und Umkehr” lays bare the deeply depressive side of Zimmermann’s personality. Both pieces are surrounded by smaller-scale chamber works.