FRIEDRICH CERHA Bruchstück, geträumt - Neun Bagatellen - Instants

Two things have happened to Cerha's music in more recent years; a conscious avoidance of rigorous structural elaboration of musical ideas in favour of small episodes of 'spontaneous inspiration'; and a decidedly autumnal feel, a sense of time running out. Old habits die hard; the harmonic thinking is still very much that of his beloved Second Viennese School, and the small disparate fragments - such as the very diverse movements that make up the Bagatelles - nonetheless form a convincingly unified whole. Bruchstück is very quiet, static, with bells and the imitation of the ticking of clocks marking the inexorable passage of time. Instants begins in compete stasis, from which a sequence of more active 'moments' of greatly contrasting character - vigorous and motoric; ethereal and calm; echoes of pastoral romanticism from far away - arises. The Bagatelles are strongly differentiated miniature character pieces which form a sequence with a convincing dramatic shape, while each fragment, however brief, has its on internal narrative.

Thomas Zehetmair / Thomas Demenga BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN Canto di Speranza

Three keyfigures from ECM’s contemporary music roster – Heinz Holliger, Thomas Zehetmair, and Thomas Demenga – team up for an exceptional recording of three works by German post-war composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Zimmermann, almost half a generation older than the serialists such as Boulez and Stockhausen, integrated state-of-the-art compositional methods in his writing while constantly following his own independent, highly expressive musical language. The rhythmically energetic violin concerto (1950) which is partially based on twelve-tone models and cast in three movements, was soon hailed as a model for a post-war solo concerto, while “Canto di Speranza” (1953/57), a one-movement cello concerto, acccording to Zimmermann, emphasizes monologue and introvert meditation. “Ich wandte mich…” on the other hand is Zimmermann’s last work, finished only a few days before his suicide in 1970. Labelled by the composer as an “ecclesiastical action”, the 35-minute oratorio on biblical verse and the famous parable "The Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” is a deeply pessimistic “performance art” work - of the kind that flourished in Germany’s ‘Fluxus’ scene around 1970 - involving recitation, singing, and both gestural and acrobatic action.