A rare beast inside the world of German modern composition – a composer whose aesthetic spills out of John Cage and Morton Feldman – Walter Zimmermann’s music has the capacity to drive those unwilling to square up to its provocations seriously nuts. Zimmermann, now 67, has never penned a consciously dramatic note in his life. His basic vocabulary is founded upon simple, those-you-have-always-loved common triads. But his tendency to dice up stock harmonic sequences and scatter the fragments inside structural labyrinths designed to trash any sense of conventional syntax willingly pits material against form.

As the longest piece in this survey by Nicolas Hodges of the composer’s recent piano music, Zimmermann’s 38-minute Voces abandonadas (2005 06) challenges assumptions that narrative fluidity is a necessary compositional virtue with music that feels constantly on the verge of collapse. Based on two collections of aphoristic lines by the Argentinean poet Antonio Porchia, Zimmermann plays out in sound the paradox that aphorisms encapsulate ideas that are grander than their form. From Porchia’s structures he generated what he terms as 514 ‘sentences’, only ever a bar long or shorter, that are then simply rolled out in sequence. These disparate aphorisms, the booklet-notes tell us, accrue weight and begin ‘to speak their own language’ – true enough. But of greater intrigue, I’d argue, is that Zimmermann has actively denied his music any tools to develop. Each bar is a world of its own but the music never actually goes anywhere; no points of climax, arrival or disturbance can change the music’s direction. Hodges plays with an appropriately dry, objectified tone, pedal kept at a minimum.

The shorter, filler pieces also exhibit material that bursts the banks of diminutive forms. The Missing Nail at the River (2003 04), suggested by Zimmermann’s visit to the Charles Ives house in Danbury, Connecticut, is charm itself as superimposed elongations and compressions of Ivesian hymnic material play simultaneously and overlap on piano and toy piano. Blaupause (2003) and Blueprint (2004) are the same music – or, more specifically, Blueprint presents a negative image of the earlier piece, notes appearing where once there were rests, loud grace notes creating ripples of harmonic interference. This is seriously infatuating stuff.