Anyone who has been intrigued—and perhaps also intimidated—by Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten should try this disc. While it might be regarded, negatively, as demonstrating the disintegration of a musical language, it also suggests that unsparing criticism—both of oneself and of the contemporary musical world—can promote a creative odyssey of great communicative force.
The Oboe Concerto (1952) vigorously confronts the central post-war challenge: if you want to embrace the new (serialism) alongside the old (neo-classicism), how do you keep your balance? The answer, for Zimmermann, was 'precariously', and the Oboe Concerto is the only work of the four included here not to chart the discovery and growth of anxiety and doubt. In the Trumpet Concerto (1954) the absorption of a negro spiritual and elements of jazz serve to intensify the trauma of a search for stylistic equilibrium. Yet again the result is an impressive work of art strongly built and progressing inexorably to a bleak conclusion.
Canto di speranza (the 1957 revision of a score completed in 1953) brings us still closer to the apocalyptic modernism of Die Soldaten (begun in 1958) as models—notably Webern—become objects of mockery. The Cello Concerto en forme de pas de trois, written after the opera in 1965–6, completes the process of recreative rejection. It is a haunting fantasy, at once ballet score and concert work, a parody of nineteenth-century terpsichorean conventions which is as bitter in tone as it is beguiling in sound.
Philips have assembled three star soloists for this well-recorded disc, and with sterling orchestral support they do the music proud.'