Ian mentioned Zimmermann's Requiem in the Berg thread. It's not a piece I know, so I'd welcome more comments, especially since Google wasn't too informative. A couple of his pieces (Les soupers de Roi Ubu and the 2nd cello concerto have fascinated me for years - but earlier, small-scale stuff has seemed far less memorable).

[I originally posted this thread a few hours ago, but it unaccountably disappeared. Apologies if it turns up elsewhere]

Thanks for the link. Stuart. Some enticing clips.

It's difficult to know where to start with describing the B.A. Zimmermann Requiem. If I say it's an extremely eclectic work, that is in no sense to make it out as some  example of pick-and-mix post-modernist musical tourism, quite the contrary. And very different to Berio's Sinfonia as well (not that I would put that work in the later category). The work employs a wide range of not only musical but also literary reference, using predominantly the words of three poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin and Konrad Bayer, all of whom committed suicide young (though the precise details of Esenin's death are ambiguous). In light of Zimmermann's own suicide the following year, this looks horribly prophetic. What makes the work so remarkable is how the sense of cogent narrative structure is so strong, so compelling, that all the many quotations, however diverse, do not sound at all like idle novelty. Even the most far-fetched - the citation of the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' - works in that way, to me fulfilling a function not dissimilar to that of 'Es ist genug' in the Berg Violin Concerto. Massively inspired, massively powerful, shatteringly bleak but utterly moving. If only it could be put on in the Proms.....

There are just two recordings I know of: one on Wergo with the Chor des Norddeutschen Rundfunks, Kölner Rundfunkchor (and others) and Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, conducted by Gary Bertini, another on Sony with the combined Kölner Rundfunkchor, Südfunkchor Suttgart, Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Slovak Chorus Bratislava and the SWF Sinfonieorchester under Michael Gielen, The latter is the better recording, I think (though I don't own the former, and haven't heard it for a while), but the former has much better documentation of texts, etc.

Imagine the most crazed hallucinatory experience you could have, but one which turns into something utterly terrifying and overwhelming. Like no other piece of music I know.

Yet another composer that I'm getting round to.
This thread has inspired me to look up the library's holdings.
We have Die Soldaten and that's it.
Got it on DVD by the looks of it, so that could well be coming to stay with me for a couple of days when I return from Brum.

I like Zimmermann's early works (Symphony in One Movement, the concertos) but I really dislike his Requiem and Die Soldaten. Like Schnittke in his lesser works, there's a little too much of everything.

Hear hear - HEAR - HEAR!!!

Also, the pianist Arrau apparently felt that Die Soldaten was one of the great post-Salome operas - which indeed it is, for all that it explores some pretty depressing ideas. It may be overly simplistic - and perhaps also inadvertently insulting - to seek to categorise Zimmermann as merely some kind of worthy successor to Berg, but the stylistic similarities are not the only reaons to do this, it seems to me; one has also to consider the sheer humanity of the best of BZ's work which, whilst perhaps arguably somewhat less consistent in that regard than is the case with Berg's own, nevertheless remains a major factor whuch simply has to be accepted and appreciated. Thanks for drawing attention to this, Ian.