There’s no sign of
Anton Zimmermann in Rosa Newmarch’s
The Music of Czechoslovakia
(nor is there in Štěpánek
and Karásek’s Outline of Czech
and Slovak music)
though there’s plenty on his exact contemporary
Wenzel Pichl and the slightly older
František Brixi and František Tůma.
Though Tůma spent almost his entire
life in Vienna in the service of the
court and Zimmermann crowned
his short compositional career with
a decade in Bratislava (then the Hungarian
Pozsony or, in German, Pressburg) he
had actually been born in Siroká
Niva in what is now Silesia. The geo-political
complications of life in the Monarchy,
no less than the religious and linguistic
ones, account for his exclusion; he
was not by birth what we would now call
a product either of the Czech lands
or of Slovakia. Nevertheless as a leading
composer in the then German-speaking
Hungarian capital he cut an impressive
figure – Court Composer, violinist and
artistic director and writer of a great
deal of music for Cardinal Batthyányi’s
orchestra. This included a large number
of symphonies and a raft of chamber
works, a number of which he saw into
print in 1767-77.
How good a composer
was Zimmermann? Well it’s been known
for years that at least two of his symphonies
were good enough to be confused with
Haydn’s and that gives one a good marker
as to his stylistic orientation. These
quartets, his Op. 3, of which there
are six in total, are undated in the
booklet notes but presumably come from
the early- to mid-1770s. Each is written
in a suite-like five movements, full
of dance rhythms and tonal amplitude.
The E major sports an attractive Allegretto
opener and a sportive Menuetto with
a long lean on the first note of a phrase
and the skittering final presto has
fine interchanges for the fiddles. The
B major is animated with the usual Zimmermann
Allegretto high spirits – spry and sparky
– and an attractive and pomposo Menuetto.
In the Adagio he utilises unison pizzicati
and then spins the first violin’s cantilena
over its undercurrent in a rather beautiful
way. Finishing this with an abrasively
jovial Presto seems entirely right.
He rings the changes with a variations
opening movement to the F major but
exploits the pizzicato idea again, this
time in the Menuet, which is full of
airy tracery and probably the high point
of this quartet.
Zimmermann’s muse then
was essentially Haydnesque though there’s
plenty of room for touches of individuality
and expressive nuance. The performances
by the Musica Aeterna Soloists have
been in Naxos’s vaults for getting on
for a decade now and I can’t trace any
previous issue. They play on original
instruments and produce a bright rather
raw tone. It’s noticeable that in the
E flat major’s violin exchanges second
violin Milos Valent cultivates a less
volatile line than does leader Peter
Zajíček
whose phrasing can be rough. Still the
rather pesant quality
this imparts also brings some rewards.
The notes are good biographically but
say little formally about the music.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Colin Clarke
Musica Aeterna Soloists 