Zimmermann/Hodges: Voces Abandonadas CD review – poetic and hugely rewarding

Discs of Walter Zimmermann’s works seem to come along every few years, providing reminders of what a quietly singular and enigmatic figure in contemporary European music he is. Nicolas Hodges’ collection covers Zimmermann’s most recent piano pieces, all composed between 2001 and 2006. There are six works here, but easily the most substantial is Voces Abandonadas, a two-part cycle lasting almost 40 minutes that was inspired by the writings of the Italian-born Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia (1885-1968).

Porchia’s aphorisms circulated widely in Argentina during the years of military dictatorship and were eventually published in Spain in 1982 as Voces Abandonadas. Zimmermann made sound representations of each of them, and these musical “sentences” – 514 altogether, rarely more than one bar long and composed, diary-like, over the course of a year – follow one another without breaks, sometimes resulting in stark contrasts of mood and style. The dedicatees of the two parts of Voces Abandonadas are Helmut Lachenmann and Morton Feldman, perhaps defining the twin poles of Zimmermann’s music, yet the music never remotely echoes either composer. Though he has always distanced himself from the serialism of the 1945 postwar avant garde, this terse music seems to hark back most of all to the world of Stockhausen’s early piano pieces of the 50s, which Stockhausen referred to as his “drawings”. Despite its multi-layered allusiveness, Zimmermann’s compendium has a similar kind of monochrome spareness.

The other pieces, to which Hodges also brings utter structural clarity and his usual punctilious care for every gradation of tone and dynamic, are generally much slighter. But the earliest, three movements from Aimide (an acronym from a Latin saying about the persistence of friendship and the transitory nature of enmity), the first of which was composed in the wake of 9/11, make a beautifully poetic 20-minute triptych that closes a hugely rewarding disc.