Helmut Zapf worked for many years as a church music director. As can well be imagined, baroque church music - above all that of Johann Sebastian Bach - has become a natural source of inspiration for the composer, not so much because of any specific techniques but for its special unity of tight construction and innate performability. To Zapf, tradition is more than a museum. Spontaneous and impulsive, he reacts to external impressions with a highted sensibility. Yet his performer's temperament is not always comfortable with the detachment necessarily involved in fixed notation. In recent years he has felt the urge to incorporate elements of improvisation in his works, thereby moving one step closer to that style of unbridled, committed music-making thst unites tenderness and strength.