One has to make a bit of an effort to recall Jean-Féry Rebel, as the music of the multitalented baroque Frenchmen is heard far too seldom. A pupil of Lully, he began as a violinist, and later became a conductor and royal chamber music composer. “Les Éléments” begins with what was for 1737 a pioneering, clusterlike description of “Chaos” that represents the creation of the world.
Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” goes a step further and creates a musical language to circumscribe the world’s status quo. In doing so, the composer dismantles the established structural way of working on motifs and themes, which makes the music appear to float amorphously in space.
With “Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht“, Zimmermann completed his monumental final work just five days before his suicide in 1970. His “Ecclesiastical Action” all too rarely forms part of the repertoire. Featuring texts taken from the Bible and Dostoyevsky, it is an expression of his despair at humankind’s eternal suffering and, following the creation (Rebel) and continued existence of the world (Ligeti), reaches an impressive culmination in its depiction of the world’s destruction (Zimmermann).