Describe Yourself
Christopher Whitley
Redshift Records TK529 (redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/track/describe-yourself)

Six contemporary pieces for violin by living composers who also happen to be fellow Canadians make an interesting artistic choice. Add to that remarkable Canadian violinist Christopher Whitley performing on the 1700 “Taft” Stradivarius violin and we get an album that is beaming with adventure, potency, depth and ingenuity. Multi-talented Whitley interprets, collaborates, vocalizes, contorts, draws and carries the various extended violin techniques and melodies with the outmost conviction, all the while staying centred in the resonance and beauty of the pure sound. He is a sound magician with a deep understanding of composer’s intentions.

Some of these pieces are oriented toward exploration of the fundamental violin sounds, others more experimental. What they have in common is the array of open spaces left for existential sound. Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Patterns in High Places is successful in creating a continuum of musical pathways that are both soothing and probing. Nicole Lizée’s Don’t Throw Your Head In Your Hands is a pure joy to listen to; a beautiful cinematic canvas underneath violin solos is created through unconventional sound manipulations using old karaoke tapes. The album closes with In Bruniquel Cave by Fjóla Evans, its atmosphere so mysterious and dark that we might feel we entered a secret chamber to hear the time passing.

A violinistic and compositional chamber of curiosities, Describe Yourself makes its mark through a grand execution of imaginative writing.

Difficult Grace
Seth Parker Woods
Cedille CDR 90000 219 (cedillerecords.org)

The work contained in cellist Seth Parker Woods’ Difficult Grace almost defies classification. This is an album of live theatre, performance art, electronics, spoken word and poetry, political awareness, storytelling, ambient music and gorgeous cello playing. The overall cohesiveness contained is a theme of commitment to art, and if you were lucky enough to catch Woods’ March 2022 Toronto performance of this album you will be familiar with what a great work of art it is. 

The scope of the works contained is wide and deep. Beginning with Frederic Gifford’s 2019 Difficult Grace, one is immediately captured for the entirety of the album. Based on the poetry of Dudley Randall’s Primitives the verbal and musically sonic transformation is easily accessed. The delivery by Woods is a performance on its own. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s third movement Lamentations from his Black/Folk Song Suite reflecting the African-American experience is solo pizzicato throughout and aptly described in the title Calvary Ostinato. 

Monty Adkins’ 1972 Winter Tendrils is a luscious melodic track, followed by Nathalie Joachim’s 1983 The Race 1915, one the album’s most powerful works. Inspired by visual artist Jacob Lawrence’s images of the historic African-American migration beginning in 1915, it features excerpts from issues of the important Black newspaper The Chicago Defender, published in that pivotal year citing the oppression and atrocities facing millions compelled to travel uncertain journeys. The spoken text and solo cello rise above the undercurrent of the train-like electronic ostinato, driving the piece to its powerful conclusion.  

Alvin Singleton’s 1970 work Arogoru (from the Twi language meaning “to play”) is a motivic, gestural piece followed by another of Joachim’s, Dam Mwen Yo. The final piece is Ted Hearn’s Freefucked (2022). A complex and yet straightforward suite of songs showcasing poems by Kemi Alabi, from their poetry collection Against Heaven, which really completes this fantastic journey with the use of electronics, vocal processing and solo cello. The suite is dynamic and full and could be listened to in parts or in whole. Each movement is stunning. It helps to follow the poetry included in the accompanying booklet but the music stands without it. This whole piece is awesome.

Recesses
Lee Weisert
New Focus Recordings FCR366 (newfocusrecordings.com)

The album Recesses is a fantastical sonic journey of melting ice, acoustic piano, degraded tape and voices, a kind of hustle and bustle mixed with water droplets and electronic fuzz. Layers of time, stratus clouds shifting, streaks of water moving through air, frost on metal, children speaking. Colours of purple, grey and green. Sparkle and dust. Layer under layer under layer. Windows open and close, breezes blow through, curtains move. Empty walls fill up with images and empty out again. Conversations rise and fall. This album is a masterful creation, a demonstration of visually listening peripherally with a third eye, of noticing and letting go.

Never feeling preachy or heavy, these four beautiful tracks morph between mindful and wild, a flowing sonic movement that feels unrushed but is never still. This is a magical space to enter without the wastefulness of extraneous noise or volume. The fourth track, Similar Speeds, is a rather mesmerizing visualization of subtle stretching of mis-timing, reminiscent of the metal ball toy Newton’s Cradle.

Professor of composition at Northwestern University, DMA pianist and multi-instrumentalist Lee Weisert has collected a brilliant team of collaborators to build his journey with. Allen Anderson on modular synth,  Nicholas DiEugenio, violin, Jonathon Kirk, electronics and Melissa Martin, vocals. This is an album to listen to while doing nothing else.

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Lumières Nordiques
Vincent Boilard; Quatuor Molinari
ATMA ACD2 2859 (atmaclassique.com/en)

Lumières Nordiques is the first solo album released by Vincent Boilard, associate principal oboe of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Featuring contemporary pieces for oboe and strings, Boilard is joined by the award-winning Molinari Quartet in his passion project to help elevate previously unrecorded Canadian works. These compositions are varied soundscapes using the full range of tonal colours and technical flourishes this group of instruments has to offer. 

Beginning with solo oboe, which is then joined by string quartet, Stewart Grant’s Serenata da Camera morphs into a set of variations that showcase each instrument, inspired by Musaeus, the original group (with Grant himself on oboe) – composed for their Belarusian tour in 1991. Boilard’s beautiful, soft tone is masterfully blended with the brilliance of the strings.

Originally a ballet, Elizabeth Raum’s Searching for Sophia was adapted to this three-movement piece for oboe and string quartet. The movements draw on sounds and harmonies from the composer’s childhood when her Syrian grandmother would sing to make her dance; a poem written by the composer about what she wishes to express in music; and traditional melodies that her mother sang to her as a child. Laced predominantly with a Middle Eastern colour, this piece uses all of the instruments equally, allowing the full range of the strings and the oboe to bring out the different characters of each movement.

Michael Parker’s Requiem Parentibus, Op.34 was written as a tribute to his father after his sudden death, exploring the emotions of incomprehension, sadness, anger and melancholy. These complex emotions are represented on the oboe with high shrieks followed by soulful lyrical playing while the strings are used mainly as an atmospheric colour.

Lastly, Brian Cherney’s In the Stillness of the Summer Wind was commissioned by his brother, oboist Lawrence Cherney, and the Hungarian String Quartet. Sounding as if inspired by summers spent in the countryside, this piece draws the listener in with various depictions of nature through the different tonal colours used by the strings as well as the four glass chimes used at the end to create the sound of a gentle, rustling breeze. 

Boilard’s virtuosity and supple tone is beautifully paired with the inspired playing of the Molinari Quartet throughout this album. Hopefully Boilard will continue this project of recording new works so that they are brought to life and appreciated.

Sounds of Time & Distance
Alfredo Santa Ana
Independent (alfredosantaana.ca) 

Born in Mexico City and working in Vancouver since 2003, composer/guitarist Alfredo Santa Ana draws on his experiences composing for television, film, dance, instrumentalists and orchestras in his self-described “hybrid” nine-track album for guitar, electronics and flute combinations.

Santa Ana does everything here with successful finesse, from performing, composing, recording, mixing, mastering and producing. Opening track Under an Orange Sky (2017), originally commissioned for 18 musicians, is a guitar duet here, performed with Michael Ibsen. Santa Ana’s musical depiction of the horrific BC fires and subsequent long periods of orange skies opens with exciting fast lines and accented single notes, followed by suspenseful longer lower-pitch held tones and occasional dissonances, and repeated midsection minimalistic lines with slower quieter sounds adding a reflective touch. More virtuosic well-thought-out guitar performances by Made in Canada Duo as Ibsen & Nathan Bredeson play Santa Ana’s interesting Foundation Visit High Scatter (2022) uninterrupted changing sound environments from slow strums to pitch slides to punchy rhythmic sections. Wave Remote (2022), performed by McGregor-Verdejo Duo, has flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor and guitarist Adrian Verdejo use loopers and electric guitar pedal technology to at times play above themselves in almost quasi rock and contemporary music improvisations. Steve Reich’s three track Electric Counterpoint (1987) receives a meticulous respectful performance by Santa Ana.

The musical world of guitar explodes with unexpected new sounds, flavours and effects in this fantastic release.

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Tim Brady – Symphony in 18 Parts
Tim Brady
Starkland ST-237 (timbrady.ca) 

One point that is often made about the electric guitar is that unlike the piano (Hanon Studies), the trumpet (Arban Method), or even its acoustic brethren (Complete Carcassi Classical Guitar Method), it does not have an established pedagogy of praxis. As such, and almost since its conception when Les Paul affixed a homemade tremolo and pickups to a pine log, the progenitors of blues, rock, jazz, funk, R & B etc. have thwarted the normative principles of the instrument in order to find a creative voice through bent strings, squelching feedback or one-hand legato fret-board tapping. Simply put, the pedagogy of the electric guitar is largely a performance practice of figuring things out on the instrument that were not intended for that instrument. And yet even within this instrumental history filled with novel approaches to the guitar, the adjective “ambitious” does not fully capture the eclectic range of creativity that, for over 35 years, has remained a hallmark of guitarist Tim Brady’s expansive output. 

Spanning genres, aggregation size and influence (from Norman Bethune to Charlie Christian!), Brady’s sprawling creativity is once again at the forefront on his most recent Symphony in 18 Parts for solo electric guitar. Take, for example, the album’s opening track, minor révolutions, as a stylistic explanation of Brady’s approach in miniature. Within this one three-minute tune, Brady alternates between “nails-on-a-chalkboard” distortion with a no less technologically mediated crystalline atmospheric timbre, putting these two sonically disparate approaches into conversation with one another while traversing rock, jazz, classic and “contemporary” music. Lots to like here for fans of “new” Canadian music, genre-bending sounds and, of course, the electric guitar.

Christopher Butterfield – Souvenir
Aventa Ensemble; Rick Sacks; Bill Linwood
Redshift Records TK538 (redshiftrecords.org) 

“Forget the gold watch,” read the University of Victoria’s press release, “noted composer and longtime School of Music professor Christopher Butterfield is marking his UVic retirement with the release of his latest album, Souvenir.” Each piece was commissioned by a different ensemble over a 20-year span. “It’s like I’m doing my own musicology here,” kibitzed the composer. The four Butterfield compositions on the album are spiritedly performed by BC’s Aventa Ensemble. Toronto percussion soloist Rick Sacks makes a virtuoso guest appearance. 

The works are as much permeated by the composer’s sure feel for classical musical architecture, 20th-century music idioms (turned sideways), colourful orchestration, quirky drama and textural variety, as they are by his off-centre, surrealistic sense of humour. For example, along with the 15-piece Aventa Ensemble, Souvenir also includes a “set of improvisations with undependable electronics,” while a field recording of Barbadian tree frogs chirps away in oblique counterpoint. Parc (2013) on the other hand, “tries hard to maintain some kind of organizational order but keeps falling off the rails.” In addition to the vibraphone solo, this percussion concerto also features a solo section for an unorthodox, organic instrument: pieces of wood.

Referring to Victoria BC’s rich musical and cultural environment, Butterfield notes it has “a reputation for composers who are looked at as rather remarkable… and nobody’s quite sure why. Is it something in the water? Is it island life?” Perhaps, the answer can be partly found in Vancouver Island’s geographic isolation, where composers “have to make everything up ourselves,” as in the case of Butterfield’s own uniquely drole musical voice.

Sirventès – Iranian Female Composers Association
Brian Thornton
New Focus Recordings FCR367 (newfocusrecordings.com) 

Sirventès is a collection of new solo and ensemble works from Cleveland Orchestra cellist Brian Thornton and the Iranian Female Composters Association, founded in 2017 and dedicated to supporting female composers from Iran through programming, commissioning and mentorship. The album, beautiful, warm and compelling, focuses on composers telling their own stories in their own voices, providing a perfect showcase for the six featured women, each accomplished and successful in her own right.

Beginning with a four-part work written for string quartet in 2017 by Tehran-born Mahdis Golzar Kashani, And the Moses Drowned is “Dedicated to Aylan Kurdi and all innocent children fallen victim to the war.” This is a beautifully descriptive work, the plaintive opening reminiscent of Arvo Pärt but quickly intensifying in modes, metres and melody. 

Nina Barzegar’s solo cello work Vulnerable is a delicate balance, expressed by the composer as, “By being vulnerable, I do not mean being in a position where one can be hurt easily. Instead, I mean experiencing great human emotions: feeling shame, sorrow, gladness, love, belonging, empathy, and embracing who we truly are….” 

Nasim Khorassani’s Growth for string trio (2017) focuses on a cell constructed by B, C, D and E flat, a deeply concentrated emotional journey that both moves and stays stagnant, almost as if describing the constraints under which it was composed. Niloufar Iravani’s 2017 string quartet The Maze is in three parts depicting the struggle to navigate emotions. 

A favourite is the title track by Anahita Abbasi, featuring Toronto’s Amahl Arulanandam, cello and Nathan Petitpas, percussion. The writing for both instruments calls back and forth between pitched and unpitched, responding without leadership but more as balanced characters in a story. It is raw, spacious and expressive, a delicate duo between the cello and percussion but also a duet between time and space.

Mina Arissian’s Suite for Cello closes the album and is beautifully played by Thornton, who never muscles in on the composers but remains committed to the most direct translations of these powerful works as possible. Some time with the enclosed information on each of these composers is well spent, getting to know just a few of the brilliant women in the Iranian Female Composers Association.

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Homage: Chamber Music for the African Continent & Diaspora
Castle of Our Skins; Samantha Ege
Lorelt LNT147 (lorelt.co.uk) 

Boston-based Castle of Our Skins (COOS) was founded in 2013 “to address the lack of equity in composer representation on concert stages.” Happily, the past decade has seen dramatically increased attention to Black composers; this CD is an example.

Safika: Three Tales of African Migration (2011) by South African Bongani Ndodana-Breen (b.1975) is performed by pianist Samantha Ege and COOD violinists Gabriela Diaz and Matthew Vera, violist Ashleigh Gordon and cellist Francesca McNeeley. Its three movements offer yearning string melodies and percussive piano “drumming” evoking traditional African song and dance, “memories of lives left behind,” says Ndodana-Breen.

Pianist Ege solos in two works. Homage (1990) by Oklahoma-born Zenobia Powell Perry (1908-2004), based on the spiritual I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned, proceeds from childlike simplicity to searching, fragmented discord. Moorish Dance, Op.55 (1904) by Londoner Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), like others of his supposedly African-inspired compositions, sounds European, here emulating Liszt.

Soweto (1987) for piano trio by Virginian Undine Smith Moore (1904-1989) condemns apartheid in three terse movements featuring dissonant chaos, a melancholy cello solo and a spiritual-inspired dirge. At 23 minutes, Spiritual Fantasy No.12 (1988) for string quartet by Texas-born Frederick C. Tillis (1930-2020) is by far the CD’s longest and, for me, most rewarding work. In four movements, each based on a different spiritual, the music is wonderfully inventive and adventurous – harmonically, rhythmically, texturally and structurally. Where/why has it been hiding, and what of Tillis’ other Spiritual Fantasies?

Carlos Surinach – Acrobats of God; The Owl and the Pussycat
Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose
BMOP Sound 1089 (bmop.org/audio-recordings) 

“My music, even the most serious pieces, all suggest, in some way, dance.” After emigrating to New York in 1951, Barcelona-born Carlos Surinach (1915-1997) was commissioned by Martha Graham to create three ballet scores, all presented on this CD.

In the 16-minute Embattled Garden (1957), flamenco-style melodies, rhythms and costumes support a scenario involving Adam, Eve, Lilith and the Devil. Brash, brassy, percussive tuttis are offset by plaintive solos for clarinet, English horn and bassoon in music that’s appropriately steamy, erotic and savage.

Graham called the 22-minute Acrobats of God (1960) “a lighthearted celebration of the art of dance and the discipline of the dancer’s world.” The circus-comedic Fanfare is followed by the first of four Interludes, three of them boisterously brusque, one satirically sentimental. The mock-Arabic Antique Dance spotlights three mandolins and a solo trumpet. Bolero is a halting, ponderous waltz. Flute, mandolins and low brass are spotlighted in Minuet, a parody reminiscent of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. Spanish Gallop’s rapid urgency builds to a clamorous climax, then ends gently with a lyrical cello solo, floating flute and hushed string pizzicati.

The Owl and the Pussycat (1978), lasting 22 minutes, is filled with madcap, playfully pompous music, lots of heavy brass and percussion including a clavinet (electronically amplified clavichord). Aliana de la Guardia recites Edward Lear’s nonsensical poem, while conductor Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project animate all three scores to vivid theatrical life, even without their original visual accompaniments.

Danny Elfman – Violin Concerto “Eleven Eleven”; Adolphus Hailstork – Piano Concerto No.1
Sandy Cameron; Stewart Goodyear; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; JoAnn Falletta
Naxos 8.559925 (naxos.com/featurePages/Details/?id=Danny_Elfman_Adolphus_Hailstork) 

This significant release juxtaposes two diverse, American composers and also celebrates multiple Grammy-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta and her 125th recording with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The two artists represented here could not be more diverse – Danny Elfman, known primarily as a film composer with an array of notable contemporary scores as well as creative relationships with brilliant writer/directors such as Tim Burton… and Adolphus Hailstork, who plumbs the depths of his potent African American heritage to manifest works embodying elements of jazz and blues, as well as motifs of indigenous West African musics. 

Lauded violinist Sandy Cameron is the featured performer in Elfman’s four-movement opus, while phenomenal pianist Stewart Goodyear propels Hailstork’s stirring concerto. Elfman’s Violin Concerto “Eleven Eleven” (2017) begins with a movement of stirring beauty, reflected in languid, dynamic bass lines and heart-stopping contrapuntal string work, all embraced in Cameron’s masterful, emotional and facile performance. The subsequent three movements, Spietato, Fantasma and Giocoso; Lacrimae also draw the listener into the miasmatic realm of the fantastic, manifested through the organism of the full orchestra.

Hailstork’s three-movement Piano Concerto No.1 (1992) is magnificently performed by Goodyear. At once delicate and percussive, Hailstork’s writing seems both luminous and yet deeply imbedded in the tangible human experience. His use of brass is incomparable, and although Hailstork and Elfman are two generations apart by birth, the creative output of these two gifted artists is conjoined by American viscera, without becoming static within linear time. The Buffalo Philharmonic continues to thrill as they skillfully move through these difficult pieces, and under the baton of the redoubtable Falletta, the large ensemble moves as one creature – embracing every dynamic, subtlety and nuance.

Room to Breathe
Joseph Swift; Calvin Hu
Independent (swiftbassoon.com/roomtobreathe) 

Given the bassoon’s concise solo repertoire, each recording of new music has the potential to contain a gem that becomes a lasting addition to the canon. Such might be the case with Room to Breathe, featuring American bassoonist Joseph Swift with pianist Calvin Hu. The five young composers on this disc have all created thoughtful, colourful works inspired by the tumult of 2020-2021. 

Swift leads off with Dueling Realities by Chris Evan Hass: well-written in a lyrical, modernist style with nice rhythmic grooves in the outer sections and some beautifully expressive writing in the middle. Gala Flagello’s Mother Time, Father Nature features some extended techniques like inside-piano damping and pitch slides, but the overall effect is lyrical and engaging. Indigo Bunting by Brad Balliett opens with dark, Bartók-like piano chords, the bassoon replying with fistfuls of cascading 16th notes, dealt with expertly by the soloist. At just over 13 minutes, this is the longest piece on the disc, disturbing in its frenetic energy but given ample relief in its more cinematic middle section. I only wish its oddly abrupt ending were more satisfying. Swift by Brian Nabors is written in a rhythmic, modernist style, with hints of Hindemith, perhaps. 

The gem on this disc, for me, is Karalyn Schubring’s i.C.u: an improvisatory, impressionistic duo full of delicate expression. Swift’s playing throughout is articulate and commanding: plenty of technical mastery, with a warm tone and expressive vibrato.

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Chicago Clarinet Classics
John Bruce Yen; Patrick Godon; Teresa Reilly
Cedille CDR 90000 218 (cedillerecords.org) 

Clarinetist John Bruce Yeh is that rare member of the profession: a veteran enthusiast. Having played in one or another capacity as a member of the Chicago Symphony clarinet section since 1977, many of those years as assistant principal, he still found motivation to curate this entertaining and interesting collection of modern to contemporary works for clarinet: with piano, unaccompanied, and in one delightful segment, a duet. All the composers are or were, at one point in their lives, situated in Chicago. 

Best known, most often performed, and possibly the most well-crafted work presented is Time Pieces Op.43 by Robert Muczynski, which is the closing bookend on the disc; the opener is Alexander Tcherepnin’s Sonata in one movement, as obscure as the Muczynski is familiar. The material in between is of varied interest. Pride of place is occupied by neo-Romantic Leo Sowerby’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano H240a (1938). The piece lasts even longer than the title might suggest. It’s how Healey Willan might have written had he lived in Chicago instead of Toronto. Beautiful, if long-winded. In these three, Patrick Godon works wonders at the piano and has effortless musical rapport with Yeh.

Most interesting are the shorter contemporary works: Phoenix Rising by Stacy Garrop, Spirit by Shulamit Ran, both unaccompanied; and especially The Forgiveness Train for two clarinets by Teresa Reilly. Reilly supplies the other voice in her piece, which when it isn’t busy doing very cool things with bends and microtonal slides could almost be an homage to Francis Poulenc’s youthful duet from a century before; I can’t tell whether Reilly wrote one part for B-flat and the other for A clarinet, as Poulenc did. Her notes in the liner make no mention of the earlier work, so I may be imagining things. Anyway, it’s a confident work from someone who by her own admission received no formal training as a composer.

Shostakovich – Symphonies 12 & 15
BBC Philharmonic; John Storgårds
Chandos CHSA5334 (chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205334) 

Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 “The Year 1917” is dedicated to the memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His intention, as he described it, was to write a symphony depicting the life of Lenin, from youth to member of the new Soviet Society. In the first movement the cellos introduce the distinctive Lenin theme we hear running throughout the symphony in one form or another. Titled Revolutionary Petrograd, it begins with the lowest strings of cello and double bass and evolves into a triumph including tympani and bass drum. Very exciting indeed! The second movement is intended to portray Razliv, Lenin’s “hideout” near St. Petersburg and we hear very sombre music underpinned with a little menace. Typical of Shostakovich. The brief third movement, Aurora, is named after the Russian battle cruiser that began the October Revolution in 1917 by firing a single blank shot at the Winter Palace. The final movement, The Dawn of Humanity, depicting life after the revolution under the guidance of Lenin, its allusions to at least a dozen other well-known works making it a complex puzzle to decipher. As expected, it ends on an exultant note.

The second work is the Symphony No.15 in A Major, Op.141. Written in 1971, in many ways this lighthearted work is his most enjoyable in my opinion. As the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This final symphony opens with quotes from the theme of The Lone Ranger (from Rossini’s William Tell) which he develops through the rest of the first movement. Many other quotes throughout the work are further orchestrated and developed by Shostakovich making this a most amusing 45 minutes. The BBC Philharmonic is in fine form under the direction of John Storgårds, who is firmly at home in this repertoire. The SACD sound is outstanding.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann – Recomposed
WDR Sinfonieorchester; Heinz Holliger
Wergo WER73872 (amazon.ca/dp/B0BD2CQLGT?ref_=cb_interstitial_us_ca_desktop_unrec_referrer_google_dp_dp) 

In the context of German post-war avant-garde composition, B.A. Zimmermann was an outlier. Rising out of the chaos of the Second World War, there formed in Darmstadt a radical circle of composers who sought a total break with tradition. Zimmermann reflected these influences at times, notably so in his epic opera Die Soldaten, but stubbornly left himself open to a myriad of influences throughout his career. Consequently, he was viewed with considerable suspicion by the aesthetic hard-liners. As Heinz Holliger explains in the superb program notes accompanying these recordings, “Zimmermann had no aesthetic prejudices. This was of course born of necessity, since he had chosen to earn his money as a house composer for WDR [West German Radio], and not as a piano or composition teacher.” Following the reform of the radio network in 1947, he completed approximately 100 arrangements for live broadcasts from Cologne which until now have languished in obscurity. Now at last, his finest examples in this genre are brought back to life, interspersed with selections of his own symphonic music in performances of the highest quality.

Disc One delights with a predominantly Latin disposition, opening with Zimmerman’s major ballet work from the 1950s, Alagoana. The polytonality and overt Brazilian references à la Milhaud also bring to mind the music of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s folkloristic ballets of the 1940s, though Zimmermann’s chromaticism is considerably more advanced. Lavishly orchestrated arrangements of piano pieces by Milhaud, Villa-Lobos and Casella along with Zimmermann’s own contributions in this genre maintain the bucolic mood. We return to Europe for the closing selections, concluding with Zimmermann’s hilariously parodistic suite of Rhineland Carnival Dances.

Disc Two features Zimmermann’s affinity for Eastern European music in the form of arrangements of works by Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff and Liszt. Two substantial Liszt selections feature the dramatic delivery of soprano Sarah Wegener. Zimmermann’s own works include Kontraste (1953), an unashamedly tonal suite of poly-stylistic dances for an imaginary ballet, a brief and breezy Concertino (1950) for piano and orchestra on a theme of Rachmaninoff, and the revised version of his substantial orchestral Konzert (1946/49) in four movements which demonstrates at this early stage of his career the lingering influence of Hindemith.

Disc Three features a grab-bag of arrangements of pleasant tunes by Smetana, Dvořák and Kodály among others. Vater and Sohn (1938), after Paul Haletski, and Edmund Nick’s Blues (1929) in particular are graced with sophisticated orchestrations. Zimmermann’s own music again bookends the disc, pairing the 1953 version of his one movement Symphony, an expressionistic work culminating in a cataclysmic march that evokes the horrors of war (he was drafted into the Wehrmacht from 1940 to 1942), and concludes with his last work for orchestra, the brooding, blues-influenced Stille und Umkehr. This ritualistic work, obsessively centred on a recurring middle D, was composed in 1970 during his stay at a psychiatric hospital. Plagued by recurring depression and rapidly deteriorating eyesight, he committed suicide later that year at the age of 52.