Over half a century since undertaking the first recording of Die Soldaten, Wergo has done full service to the memory of Bernd Alois Zimmermann with a steady stream of releases. The latest of them strikes the most vivid and precarious balance between the composer’s determined if self-conscious contribution to German musical culture and his self-negating satire of that very tradition.

In both the one-movement Symphony and a neo-classical Concerto for string orchestra, Zimmermann responded to time-honoured genres with characteristically violent invention. In the spicily Bartókian harmonies of the Concerto’s central aria, Zimmermann can be heard searching for a voice that would burst forth with obstreperous individuality in the Symphony’s thunderous opening gambit. Most latter-day performances (there are two to be sampled at the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall) present his slightly moderated revision of 1953, but the WDR Symphony Orchestra (replete with gothically thunderous organ) throw their considerable weight behind the original, still-unpublished version which outraged critics at its premiere two years earlier. Peter Hirsch conducts an account of implacable momentum, aided in untangling some thorny textures by Wergo’s wide sound stage.

The luridly coloured, inflated clowning of Giostra genovese (1962) forsakes the affectionate spirit of homage to be relished in the Rheinische Kirmestänze (a still unrecorded gem from the 1950s). Its brash parodies of Byrd, Gibbons and Susato are scarcely more comfortable on repeated listening than Musique pour les soupirs du roi Ubu, the ‘ballet noir’ in which Zimmermann responded to an honorary academic appointment with a swivelled finger at, well, everything. In this rough-housing collage of quotations, ‘enjoyment’ of music so masterfully designed to make the flesh crawl must be beside the point; but when your ears and preconceptions need the hairdryer treatment, Zimmermann can still knock you out of your seat.