More and more recordings of Walter Zimmermann's beguilingly enigmatic music have become available in recent years, from Nicolas Hodges’ survey of his piano music on Voces abandonadas (a series of WDR recordings from 2009, eventually released by Wergo in 2016) to the 2019 Mode reissue of the complete Lokale Musik recordings (originally released on LP in 1982), the Sonar Quartett's Songs of Innocence & Experience, a collection of Zimmermann's string music from 1977 to 2003 (again for Mode, released in 2020) and the retrospective gathering of his music for voices on the Voces album (also Mode, released in 2022). But this Chantbook is different, conceived not so much as a compendium, more as an album, where musical ideas flow across the ten tracks with a cumulative expressive intent.
The paradox is that this album too is a sort of retrospective, drawing together works from a period between 1994 and 2021; what makes it special, however, is that each work has been reconceived for the resources of Lipparella, a Swedish ensemble devoted to the creation of a new repertoire for Baroque instruments and countertenor. Walter Zimmermann's collaboration with Lipparella began in 2019, the product of a chance meeting of Zimmermann and Lipparella's Peter Söderberg at the Ultraschall festival in Berlin, but only two of the works presented here were written specifically for Lipparella. Dit, for example, was written in 1999 for ensemble recherche's ‘In nomine’ project. A solo string instrument, a cello in the recherche version, a viola da gamba on this album, shadows the melody of a folk song from Western New Guinea that, like John Taverner's ‘In nomine’ melody, has a range of a ninth. It's a breathtakingly arbitrary connection, and in this new setting it is no longer even contextualised by other ‘In nomine’ music; but it's also breathtakingly beautiful: for a little more than two minutes voices speak to one another across time, geography and cultures.
Something similar happens on the opening track. Cirkel begins and ends with the voice of the Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009) chanting parts of her poem ‘Lys’ (1962); her intonations are diatonic, with something of the quality of a nursery rhyme, yet they frame music for countertenor and theorbo, Zimmermann's 2019 setting of another Christensen poem, that is much more fragmented and chromatic. ‘To sketch a spindly circle in water or air’ is how the poem begins and it is just such a spindly circle that Zimmermann's music evokes, the complexity of his musical response apparently at odds with the assuredness of the poet's own voice.
Different qualities of voicing are also explored in the third and fifth tracks, Gras der Kindheit and Från Hovets Bibliotek aus der Bibliothek des Meeres (both 2006), where Peter Söderberg's oud playing and Louise Agnan's viola da gamba playing respectively is combined with their singing. Both sing well but there is no doubt that this is not their day job. As Söderberg observes in the excellent liner notes that accompany the CD, his is a particularly challenging task: ‘it was not until the score had arrived’, he writes, ‘that I realized that this was actually a solo work, demanding the performer to play the oud and use his voice – singing in German and reciting in Arabic’. He goes on to comment that this task is ‘unusual and insecure’ but also has ‘desirable qualities, such as a certain directness and intimacy’. This is emphasised by the track ordering, the insecurity of the two part-time singers framing Zman-vertont (2007) in which Mikael Bellini's thrillingly exact countertenor weaves around Baroque oboe and violin lines.
Lipparella's musicianship is consistently compelling: they have found their way into the heart of Zimmermann's enigmatic, anti-rhetorical aesthetic, and the performances and recordings have that ‘certain directness and intimacy’ that Söderberg mentions. Yet the music itself, for all its textural and formal clarity, is rarely direct. The earliest work, Shadows of Cold Mountain 1 (1994), sounds straightforward enough: the music traces a single sliding line, but what is determining its path, and why is it being played simultaneously by three tenor blockflutes (here multitracked)? The answers are provided in Zimmermann's contribution to the liner notes: the sliding line is a transcription of calligraphy from the ‘Cold Mountain’ series that Brice Marden (1938–2023) began in the mid-1980s and it is multitracked because the resultant interference tones draw together ‘the world of colour and the world of sound’.
Like all Walter Zimmermann's work, the Chantbook for Lipparella maps an ocean of intertextual currents. His is music that has fascinated me ever since I first encountered it in 1982, but nowhere before have I found the paradox of its variety of means and unity of purpose so beautifully articulated as it is in this album. To quote Inger Christiansen's words in Cirkel again, this is music that ‘sketches a spindly circle’ but, as it does so, also ‘puts a finger to the lips’ and ‘lays a hand on the heart’.
