Zimmermann: Alagoana; Symphony in One Movement; Photoptosis; Stille und Umkehr CD review – taut and enigmatic

Pairs of works from the beginning and end of BA Zimmermann's all-too-short composing career are juxtaposed here. The early pieces – the half-hour ballet Alagoana, whose Latin-Americanisms could make it easily mistaken for a score by Heitor Villa-Lobos, is a product of the late 1940s, while the Symphony in One Movement followed soon afterwards (although dating early Zimmermann scores precisely is not straightforward). The symphony is impressively taut and compact, though like passages in the ballet its fundamentally neoclassical style sometimes becomes overwrought and congested. It certainly seems far away from the much sparer, atonal world of the later music. The prelude for orchestra Photoptosis may be one of Zimmermann's most often performed scores, but laced with quotes from Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin it's also one of his most enigmatic. Meanwhile, Karl-Heinz Steffens's performance of Stille und Umkehr, Zimmermann's final orchestral work, reveals it to be a haunting and obsessive miniature masterpiece that is hard to forget.