Can artists ever be born at the wrong time? Many have thought so, not least Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose centenary year this is. He was too young to have been part of the modernist development before World War Two – one thinks of Hindemith and Karl Amadeus Hartmann – and yet in post-war Germany he was regarded as too old to be fully accepted by the avant-gardist Darmstadt School. Less than a decade after writing his Symphony in One Movement he argued: “It’s not tradition that creates the composer, it’s the composer who creates tradition.” This work formed a powerful ending to the first half of the BBC Philharmonic’s concert under John Storgårds.
The sense of the cataclysmic, of disintegration and fragmentation, of great waves of repressed rage breaking through (Zimmermann emerged from his wartime service a permanent invalid and later took his own life), was well conveyed, though the brisk speeds and the tight rein controlling the flow were sometimes at the expense of some of the filigree textures that offer moments of repose and reflection. In particular, there is a central section suggestive of a requiem for the lost state of innocence where individual orchestral voices sigh, quiver and whimper. It’s a piece which certainly lends itself to the wide spaces of the Royal Albert Hall – I am surprised it took this long for it to receive its first Proms performance – and I am disappointed that Storgårds opted for the revised version of 1953 rather than the original with its magnificent organ obbligato.
Composers, like everybody else, have to earn a living. Zimmermann worked for one of the leading German radio stations, writing arrangements of almost everything under the sun (including folk music) and providing incidental music for radio plays. In the rediscovery of melodies and their transmutation he was part of a long tradition stretching back even further than Liszt, half of whose 800 or so piano compositions were themselves arrangements. Few would question the ultimate defence of such transcriptions put forward by Busoni: “Why are variations considered worthy because they change the original, while arrangements are considered unworthy because they too change the original?”
Liszt was represented here with four orchestrations of Lieder by Schubert as well as his Wanderer Fantasy. Elizabeth Watts was the fine, silvery-toned soloist whose dramatic projection and communicative powers were heard to advantage in “Die junge Nonne” and “ Lied der Mignon”. In “Gretchen am Spinnrade” the sense of restlessness at the outset (“Meine Ruh’ ist hin”) was somewhat underplayed and words were later lost through overloud accompaniment. “Erlkönig” is always a major test. Schubert places each of the four characters in the song – narrator, father, son and the Erlking himself (a kind of supernatural demon) – in different vocal ranges. Some things worked, like Watts’ beautifully ethereal tones for “Du liebes Kind”, matched by the siren-like qualities of the accompanying flutes. However, I doubt whether any female voice can summon up quite the dynamic range and weight to do full justice to the male protagonists.