The ECM project of combining Thomas Demenga’s recordings of Bach’s suites with twentieth-century string music rolls on. I remain as sceptical as I was at the outset (12/90) about the project’s value as a way of putting CD programmes together, but with Zimmermann, at least, Demenga can point to the composer’s own reference to Bach in his notes on the three sonatas, and one of them, for viola, even quotes a chorale melody.
Zimmermann’s musical world was of course more expressionistic than neo-classical, so a Bach quotation serves an emotional rather than a structural purpose. The Violin Sonata (1951) is already intense in a relatively orthodox, Schoenbergian way. Four years later, in the Viola Sonata, the composer’s response to the tragically early death of his daughter generates outbursts of rage and anguish that are all the more affecting for emanating from a normally unassertive instrument. The relative stability evident in the Violin Sonata is undermined, and the reference to Bach conveys more bitterness than consolation.
Zimmermann’s Cello Sonata of 1960 is a lesser achievement than the two earlier works, and there’s now a touch of routine about the way the composer parades his fractured textures and extreme effects. Zimmermann needed to develop the more explicit pluralism of his later years in order to realize the full potency of his expressionistic style, but this disc is useful for the way it fills out our knowledge of the composer’s earlier manner, and it is technically immaculate. The Bach is played with verve and eloquence, too.'