That’s a digger on the cover of this CD, but not just any digger. Look closely and you’ll see caterpillar tracks, those earth-treading ridges which allow the machine extra leverage to pummel the ground with unrelenting force – a fitting visual metaphor for the music of German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann.

Recent releases of Zimmermann’s music have tended to group around the extraordinary vocal music he composed shortly before his suicide in 1970, and this disc features the orchestral music he was writing alongside and usefully plugs the historical gaps. Photoptosis, subtitled ‘Prelude for Grand Orchestra’ (1968), is usually considered Zimmermann’s defining work but never has it sounded so raw-boned and unrelenting: kudos to the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz and Karl-Heinz Steffens for pulling off such a chancy, intrepid performance.

The work of Yves Klein, the artist who flooded his images with his own self-invented kind of blue, led Zimmermann to think about a piece that could find timbral variety within monochrome colour. The beginning is anchored around the harmonic interference provoked by a wobbling semi-tone before the music plunges towards a time-warp of barely concealed quotes: Beethoven’s Ninth pummelling the earth, digging out space where memories of Bach, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin can be laid to rest. Having primed a white canvas, it’s time to start painting again – with quotation which melts towards purist whole-tone harmony.

This final section is controlled with exceptional perspicacity by Steffens, who moves colour around as if sound itself has become a resonant pigment in his hands. Zimmermann’s Stille und Umkehr (written in 1970 – not 1927 as the booklet states) is another monochrome study that deals up a paradox: a jazz drummer attempts to assert time as the orchestra remains stubbornly motionless. Alagoana is an early ballet score that shows Zimmermann’s eager ear for pastiche; Sinfonie in einem Satz (1953) finds him playing with the residue of serialism, and breaking for the borders.