Search - Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Udo Zimmermann, Bernhard Wambach :: Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Music for Cello and Piano

Simply wonderful Angst still here with us. . .

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 03/01/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"you cannot find two more sensitive musicians here playing some of the most arduous music ever written. The Solo Cello Sonata is really a high point in cello literature,a master-werke; no cellist should overlook this work,along with those solo works of Xenakis and Scelsi. The Solo Sonata here reflects the tortured century one that it doesn't look like any of the hatreds and hypocrisy has resolved itself toward any useful agenda short of claiming pre-emptive war and occupying land as a viable option.Zimmermann was however looking backwards at his own tortured history and came to comment on the present through this recepticle.We can of course look at the present from this past and see what? The Sonata is filled with high intensity moments,tremoli, percussive brutal double-stops all thrown at the listener freely with weight and conviction.Also the use of the cello in uncompromising postions in ugly fourth and fifth positions, along with extended timbres,sul ponticello, sultasto all wonderfully utilized. Anyone can use these technique we know, but Zimmermann in his late music always now finds an exciting context where his voice can speak quite freely quite unencumbered,positing a n aesthetic; we don't know how much of this Angst,or existential premonitions was aprt of his eye condition that led to his suicide,oddly the miniature "four pieces" for cello, would be a legacy all to itself. Theses pieces should be studied by every serious cellist if they have any pretentions of understanding modernist expressions, if not well, go play your musical pablum, Schlafen Sie!.

The piano suite here was a transitory work quite lumbered in the numbers of movements, yet they redeem themsleves by their short length.Zimmermann took duration as a serious dimension of music.He went years without understanding it, and frequently resorted to extra0programmatic agendas meremly to fill a creative void. He really is a primary orchestrator as well with hisioera "Die Soldaten" and "Photopsis",(his eye condition,flashing sparks around the eys internally).The piano works are not without interest,his "Configurations"(see Tiny Wirtz recording)and holds great dimensions of abstract thinking,that certainly gives Stockhausen's "klavierstuck"(a set of works that stymied the post-war generation as Berio)gives a run for the money.The cello and piano work as Edward exclaims is also an exciting piece, also one that challenges the genre of the duet, subversive to the ad nauseum 'Sonatas' we have in the modernist literature, Poulenc, Hindimith,Milhaud."