Two cantatas by Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Michael Wertmüller deal with the transience of human life. These cantatas will be performed by Christina Daletska, Graham Valentine and an ensemble of experts under Lennart Dohm. Here and there, language becomes spoken music—and time travels four centuries backwards.

«Everything has its time»—the quote from the Song of Solomon fascinated Bernd Alois Zimmermann throughout his compositional career. Again and again he took returned to it and illuminated it in new ways, for example, in a solo cantata from 1957. Sixty years after Zimmermann, the Berlin-based, Bernese composer and percussionist Michael Wertmüller, a master in the the layering of different time spans, present the text in a similar manner. He reinterprets it, questions it and creates various references.

Via their mutual uncompromising attitude, their burning and sensitive fascination for current events and their love of theatre, the two musicians bridge decades. Between the cantatas, another topic is highlighted that fascinates Zimmermann and Wertmüller: language as music. In Graham Valentine’s reading, text becomes a musical performance, then linguistic and linguistic theatre—interludes by Frescobaldi’s «Cento partite sopra passcagli» create a rising sequence of variations.