Aribert Reimann was born in Berlin in 1936, and studied composition with Boris Blacher at the city's Hochschule fur Musik. It was an accompanist that Reimann made an early career working with the great names that including Fischer-Dieskau, Brigitte Fassbaender, Ernst Haefliger, and more recently Christine Schafer. It is the relationship with singers that has shaped much of his output as a composer, all three works on this disc featuring the baritone voice. They are settings of words by Paul Celan, a poet born in Czernowitz (now part Romania), but who fled to Paris via Vienna with the onset of Communism in his homeland. His poems are mainly in a non-logical language, sounds of words creating visual images. The two met in Paris in 1957, and it was in those word sounds that Reimann found an artist working in a style complementary to his own. Zyklus, composed in 1971, introduced me to Reimann in the concert hall a number of years ago, the score I admired greatly, though I am well aware that his atonality is an acquired taste best left to those who are into cutting-edge modernity. Essentially the voice and instruments - a large orchestra without violins - work independently, Reimann seemingly commenting on the words in sound. It was dedicated to Fischer-Dieskau who gave the first performance in Nuremberg later that year. Kumi Ori came twenty-eight years later and is musically in the same abstract mode, the words from Celan supplemented by three Psalms. It was first performed in 2000 by the baritone, Yaron Windmuller and the North German Radio Orchestra. Finally the short Die Pole sind in uns for baritone and piano, the accompaniment played both on the keyboard and inside the instrument. That dates from 1995, but Reimann is not a man to change his style of writing. Windmuller has both a wide vibrato, and the vocal stamina for these taxing scores, his clarity of diction is excellent and I will happily take his intonation as authentic. Gunther Herbig draws very detailed playing from the Saarbrucken orchestra, and the recording from the radio studio is good.