A piece composed nearly sixty years ago is performed and narrated in a varied time reference by another composer. This is what Michael Pelzel does with Zimmermann’s cello sonata, played by the internationally renowned Thomas Demenga and his former student Sebastian Braun, who has become one of the most sought-after New Music cellists of his generation.

There is a quote from the Song of Solomon that is pertinent to Zimmermann’s cello sonata: «... et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo» (Luther: «Everything under the heavens has its hour.»).

This piece, also composed in five phrases, has a broad time-sound-space. Due especially to its selective sonic focus, its instrumental sophistication and its impulsive and intimate melody, Zimmermann’s musical language also fascinates the Swiss composer Michael Pelzel, especially because of its tonal field of depth, its instrumentary finesse and its melodics that is simultaneously impulsive and intimate. «Wild and jagged eruptions are juxtaposed alongside static and recitative ‘parlando’. Calculus versus improvisation.» Pelzel’s pieces refer to Zimmermann’s «Spherical shape of time», creating a differentiation between experienced and objective time perception. «For me, as a composer it is also very important to shape and influence this sense of time. So to make an objectively shorter musical passage seem subjectively longer or vice versa. Such questions always pose new challenges for me: exciting compositional riddles arise from it.»

Festival philosopher Christian Grüny takes time here and there to ponder on Zimmermann. «Meaning is repetition, culture is repetition, resonance is repetition, repetition is repetition. Meaning needs resonance, repetition needs resonance, resonance needs resonance. Distances and differences everywhere, and nothing ever comes back. This will need to be discussed.»