Wergo’s long-term Bernd Alois Zimmermann Edition now continues with this ambitious ‘Recomposed’ project, placing six of his own works within the context of those by others he orchestrated during 1949‑54, when much of his income came from over 100 arrangements for radio orchestras operating out of Cologne. ‘Hack-work’ they may have been, though, as Heinz Holliger reveals in his finely attuned accounts with the WDR Symphony Orchestra, these pieces shed considerable light across Zimmermann’s own creative preoccupations.

Each volume constitutes an overview of this composer’s greater output. The first includes a soulful Villa-Lobos rumba originally for piano, followed by two stylish orchestrations from Milhaud’s Saudades do Brasil, then a brace from Casella’s Undici Pezzi infantili whose deft luminosity owes much to the ‘continuo’ role for tuned percussion. Zimmermann’s reticent Bolero moderato matches his engaging take on Hans Helfritz’s Bolivian dances, with those on Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin’s ‘bergerettes’ enhanced by Sarah Wegener’s sensuous soprano.

Wegener returns on the second volume in songs by Liszt, a volatile setting of Nikolaus Lenau with obbligato cimbalom and an eloquent setting of Victor Hugo that deserves frequent airplay. Also here are probing orchestrations of two late piano pieces by Mussorgsky, Zimmermann’s insouciant Valse triste and substantive reworkings from Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de salon, featuring saxophonist Marcus Weiss and pianist Ueli Wiget, that between them underline his appreciation and understanding of a figure only grudgingly acknowledged in West Germany.

Featuring a suave take on one of Busoni’s most appealing piano miniatures, the third volume continues with equally characterful orchestrations of dances by Smetana and a lilting mood-picture by Dvořák. A ‘folk’ ensemble with string quintet and piano served Zimmermann well in understated arrangements of piano pieces from Walter Niemann, Kodály, Cyril Scott and Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, while those of ‘light’ pieces by senior radio colleagues Paul Haletzki and Edmund Nick confirm his involvement in jazz idioms as being pervasive and profound.

Bookending each volume are original works. That the ballet Alagoana (1955) has not found favour is surprising, as any one of these five scintillating ‘Brazilian capriccios’ would make an ideal encore. So too, in a chamber context, those avian vignettes of Un petit rien (1964) or abrasive parodies of Rheinische Kirmestänze (1962). Derived from music for a puppet play, Kontraste (1953) is virtually a workshop of Zimmermann’s orchestral practice in this period, with the previously unrecorded Concerto for Orchestra (1949) an uninhibited if unfocused statement that youth orchestras ought to seize upon gratefully. The other pieces are staples of this composer’s discography, but Symphony in One Movement (1953) can rarely have been rendered with such an acute awareness of its perilous balance between formal ingenuity and an uninhibited expression verging on implosion. Such a state might be thought embodied in the ‘orchestral sketches’ Stille und Umkehr (1970) – its speculative fusion of jazz chords, blues rhythm and minimalist textures blurring any boundary between nihilism and transcendence.

Anyone following the Wergo series will need little prompting to acquire this latest release, but those new to or curious about this composer should make it their first port of call on what will prove an engrossing if unsettling journey. The excellence of these performances is abetted by their immediacy of sound, and Rainer Peters’s notes on each piece complemented by Michael Kunkel’s illuminating discussion with Holliger. Stylishly presented, it constitutes an odyssey around and about Zimmermann that reaffirms his ever-increasing relevance for the present.