Harrison Birtwistle, "Grimethorpe Aria"

-- Liner Notes --



The brass band occupies a special place in British musical life. Widely admired, yet almost completely isolated from other forms of music making; entirely amateur in its playing status, yet at its highest level, virtuosic in instrumental technique; deserving a new, rich, continuing repertoire, yet extremely conservative in its musical taste, it presents for the present day composer a paradox, at once an exciting potential medium, yet one whose specialised instrumentation and cautious musical approach combine to produce a somewhat daunting challenge. Nevertheless, in the past few years several composers outside conservative circles have tackled the problem with great enthusiasm, enlivening and revitalising a repertoire which had become in-bred and stale.

Each of the composers on this disc has come to the brass band from a different background: Henze from the main-stream of European tradition with no previous knowledge of such' a grouping of brass instruments: Takemitsu, the Japanese composer, by way of the brass ensemble (itself previously unknown to him) and in an arrangement of my own: Birtwistle from childhood memories of bands playing in his native Accrington in the north of England-and co-incidentally in a neighbouring village of Grimethorpe where he had relatives living in the late 40s: and myself from the inside as a former bandsman.

Birtwistle's GRIMETHORPE ARIA, was the first work commissioned by the Grimethorpe band from a leading composer and dates from 1973. Uncompromisingly bleak in mood, mostly slow in tempo, its anguished, pessimistic harmonies have not yet endeared it to band audiences reared on more ear-tickling fare. Like Henze, though in a different way, Birtwistle has re-structured the traditional scoring, rejecting the hierarchy of massed cornets and unison tubas in favour of individual parts. The result is a dense, yet multi-layered texture, massive in the great climaxes of the work (doubled in this performance on the two bands).

The shape of the piece may be summarised as follows:



Grimethorpe Aria, startled the band public of 1973 into an awareness of a wider musical world; fortunately for audiences of the future its strongly felt and realised emotional content will assure it a place in band history of much more significance than any mere passing succes de scandale-rather as a masterpiece of the repertoire. -- Elgar Howarth

Hans Werner Henze, "Being Beauteous" (1963)

Cantata on the poem of the same name
from "Les Illuminations" (1872/73) by Arthur Rimbaud,
for coloratura soprano, harp, and 4 violoncelli

-- Liner Notes --

February 1966: "I have just heard a new soprano. She has sung to me. We shall work together." Hans Werner Henze was enthusiastic.--"Her name?"--"Edda Moser." That April, at a B.B.C. recital in London, Edda Moser sang Henze's "Being Beauteous" and "Cantata della Fiaba Estrema" under the composer's direction. The event was a success both for Henze and for his young soloist.

After London came Dresden. Edda Moser sang "Being Beauteous” again--this time from memory. A Deutsche Grammophon recording team heard the concert. The telephone wires began to buzz, and the singer was offered an exclusive contract.

She took over from Ingeborg Hallstein the ro1e of Autonoe in Henze's "Die Bassariden" when the opera was performed at the German Opera, Berlin, conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi. As the new General Musical Director of Frankfurt he at once offered Edda Moser a contract there. Herbert von Karajan heard her, and engaged her for his Salzburg Festival production of "Das Rheingold". She sang under Claudio Abbado in Vivaldi's "Gloria" in Berlin, and in Luigi Nono's "Canto sospeso” in Hamburg. She takes the part of Amor, as partner of Fischer-Dieskau, in Karl Richter's recording of Gluck's "Orpheus and Eurydice”. It has become common knowledge that Edda Moser is a magnificent singer for modern music. But--and we should take off our hats to her for this--she sings Mozart equally well. To Edda Moser the one presupposes the other. She refuses to be type cast. She draws on the riches of the entire repertoire, and is fully equipped to do so. She worked on dramatic coloratura soprano roles: the Queen of Night, Constanze, Lucia, Gilda, Violetta and Fiordiligi-these were her goal.

She has invested the experiences thus acquired in her interpretations of modern music. Vocal technique is put to the service of interpretative analysis of form, at the same time preventing this from becoming drily academic. The interpretation blossoms out in song, transformed into a seemingly free artistic process, as the rigidity with which notes have to be set down on paper gives place to that music which the composer imagined.

Hans Werner Henze, "Whispers From Heavenly Death"

Henze's Vocal Compositions

It is a cause of surprise that Hans Werner Henze, who in his operas and many other compositions has evolved a vocal style which is both extremely singable and offers a wide range of expressive possibilities, wrote his first opera "Das Wundertheater" not for singers but for actors. He may therefore be said to have embarked upon his work in the sphere of dramatic music at point zero. The spoken word, not singing, was his starting point. A certain diffidence vis-à-vis opera determined the nature of his first work of an operatic character.

However, it had been preceded by several vocal compositions: choral pieces on texts by Goethe, Villon and Lope de Vega, and the concert aria "Der Vorwurf", to words by Franz Werfel. Also among this group of early attempts to draw the human voice into a composition, and to assign to it the principal role which it was later to claim with ever increasing insistence, is the Whitman Cantata "Whispers from Heavenly Death" (1948). The brief form of the almost aphoristic poem originally inspired Henze to a composition for piano and voice, and it was only later that he re-wrote it for eight solo instruments and high soprano. For the first time in his career he attempted on that occasion to employ the twelve-tone system, in whose use he had recently been instructed to fashion a vocal line, around which a web of sound is woven by trumpet, celesta, harp, cello and small percussion instruments. The scoring is distantly reminiscent of that which Pierre Boulez was to choose a few years later for his "Marteau sans maître”.

Fifteen years after the Whitman Cantata appeared "Being Beauteous" and the "Cantata della Fiaba Estrema", links in a chain of works which also included the Giordano Bruno Oratorio "Novae de Infinito Laudes", the "Six Absences", the 5th Symphony, the "Choral Fantasia", the "Ariosi", the "Lucy Escott Variations", and "Los Caprichos". They stand between the operas "Elegy for Young Lovers" and "Der junge Lord".

"Being Beauteous", for which Henze had made sketches and studies at Castelgandolfo in 1962, was completed after his return from America. He had gone to New York-for the first time in his life-to be present at the world premiere of his 5th Symphony under Leonard Bernstein. He had left New York quickly, oppressed by the teeming impressions of the city-Harlem by night, and the all-pervading atmosphere with its blend of sweetness and apprehension, decay and danger. He incorporated the essence of this atmosphere into the sketches which he had left behind in Italy, and fashioned them into "Being Beauteous". Only after the composition was clear in his mind's eye did Henze look around for a suitable text, and he recalled to mind Arthur Rimbaud's hallucinatory verses, his ecstatic works shot through with alarming visions. In the "Illuminations", which the poet wrote in 1872/73, he found "Being Beauteous", a "prose poem".

Henze set each of Rimbaud's phrases as an aria in miniature, illustrated by interjections of the four cellos and harp, which constitute the small instrumental ensemble. Despite the intensity of feeling the music has a clear formal shape, which derives from a wide diversity of rhythmical patterns. Strict construction preserves the continuity of the melodic line spun out by the instruments. The voice surrounds this line with arioso lyricism. In the Interlude before the last Aria the muted cellos arrive at the verge of silence. Then, below tranquil harp triplet figures, the voice is heard again-a suggestion of rapture which transcends pain and sings its way to Nirvana.

It is not known where and when Elsa Morante was born. She is at present living in Rome. She has published a number of works, including "Menzogna e Sortilegio" (Falsehood and Sorcery), 1948, "L'Isola di Arturo" (Arthur's Island), 1957, and "Lo Scialle Andaluso" (The Andalusian Shawl), 1964. The poem "Alibi", which Henze has set, is taken from a collection which appeared under the same title in 1959. It seems as though this composition-the "Cantata della Fiaba Estrema"-with its succession of choruses and solo numbers, had the cantatas of Bach as its model. This is especially clear in the Chorale of the "Cantata": on the melody "Mein liebster Jesus, was hast du verbrochen", it introduces the intervals of the theme in all four parts, and varies it.

The "Cantata" is a dream piece, in which the imagination has invented a human being. Henze has attempted to follow the lines of the poem, and to interpret them through his music.-- Klaus Geitel

Cantata on the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman
I.
Darest thou now, o soul
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet
Nor any path to follow?

II.
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding. Nor touch of human hand.
Nor face with blooming flesh,
Nor lips, nor eyes are in that land.

III.
I know it not, o soul.
Nor dost thou. All is a blank before us.
All waits undream'd of
In that region, that inaccessible land.

IV.
Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense nor any bounds
bounding us.

V.
Then we burst forth,
We float in Time and Space,
0 soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last.
(0 joy! 0 fruit of all!)
Them to fulfill, o soul.

Hans Werner Henze, "L'Usignolo dell'Imperatore"

2. L'USIGNOLO DELL'IMPERATORE
"The Emperor's Nightingale" was written in Spring 1959, during a visit to Wolfsgarten in Hesse, in a room on top of a voliere with Chinese nightingales in it. It is dedicated to Ludwig and Margareth of Hesse. It is a ballet pantomime as well as a flute concerto; the structure, in its rigour of rhythmic austerity, should bring out the ceremoniality of the action as I imagined it to be put on stage. The story, designed for my music by the Neapolitan composer, Giulio di Majo d'apres H. C. Andersen, is told in simple terms.

I. A cavalier with his friends walking in the forest near the sea. They hear the song of the nightingale. They meet the bird and invite it to sing for the emperor who is a child still.
II. The nightingale is presented to the emperor.
III. It sings for him (2 variations and cadenza).
IV. The emperor weeps with emotion.
V. An artificial nightingale is presented at Court.
VI. Song of the artificial nightingale (piccolo flute) which cracks at the end of the song.
VII. The emperor wishes the true nightingale to sing again but it has disapp&red. The emperor falls ill, he is taken to bed.
VIII. Death sits at the bedside, wearing the emperor's crown and sceptre. The emperor is dying. The natural nightingale comes in and begins to fight against Death with its song. Gradually, it forces Death to give back crown and sceptre, and to steal away.
IX. The emperor recovers. Universal happiness.

The first stage performance was on September 16th, 1959, in the Fenice Theatre in Venice during the Biennale, in a show entitled "Spettacoli per bambini", staged by Franco Enriquez. Aurele Nicolet played the first concert performance during the Berlin Festival the same year.

Hans Werner Henze, "Wiegenlied Der Mutter Gottes"

1. WIEGENLIED DER MUTTER GOTTES
About Christmas time, 1948, in Gottingen, I found Lope de Vega's "Lullaby" printed (in German translation, I have never been able to see the Spanish original) in a playbill of the local theatre, and set it to music the next day. I think it mirrors quite clearly the tender and happy mood of those months, but is quite different in structure from the other pieces written in that period. They all have one thing in common, though: the same tone row which, I remember, seemed to me the key to all mysteries then. I could write sad music on it as well as sarcastic one, comic and lyrical. The first performance of this piece seems to have taken place in Duisburg, 1954, under Georg Ludwig Jochum, but I was already living in Italy then. As a matter of fact, I heard it for the first time when I made the present recording.

Hans Werner Henze, "Labyrinth"

Liner Notes

1. LABYRINTH
In 1951, when I was artistic director of a small ballet company attached to the National Theatre of Wiesbaden, I wrote this psycho-chamber-jazz ballet for it. It was never staged because the company dissolved before we could put it on. I conducted the score in a concert on the Darmstadt-Frankfurt a.M. Music Festival on May 29th, 1952.

The ballet tells the story of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, in a condensed, anagogical and anagrammatical fashion. It is, as a subject, quite similar to Gozzi's "The King Stag" which I composed as an opera three years later.

I. Permanent Menace: Adolescents of Knossos under the threat to be fed to the Minotaur.
II. Cantus choralis: Plea to Theseus to kill the monster.
III. Conflict: Ariadne tries to prevent Theseus from facing the dangers involved by going into the Labyrinth and challenging the Minotaur. But Theseus is adamant.
IV. Variation: She invents the device of the thread stuck to Theseus, made to pull him back out of the Labyrinth in case he would get lost in it.
V. Minotaurus Blues: Theseus in the Labyrinth fights the Minotaur and kills him.
VI. Fantasy in Rose: Theseus and Ariadne happily reunited among the people of Crete who are grateful to be liberated from their nightmare.

THE LONDON SlNFONIETTA
Nona Liddell, Violin . Violon . Violine
Joan Atherton, Violin . Violon . Violine
Donald McVay, Viola . Alto . Bratsche
Jennifer Ward Clarke, Cello . Violoncelle . Violoncello
John Steer, Double-bass . Contrebasse . Kontrabass
Sebastian Bell, Flute . Fllite . Fldte
Janet Craxton, Oboe, Cor anglais . Hautbois, Cor anglais . Oboe, Englischhorn
Tony Coe, Saxophone . Saxophone . Saxophon
Antony Pay, Clarinet, Bass-clarinet . Clarinette, Clarinette basse . Klarinette,
Bassklarinette
* John Stenhouse, Bass-clarinet . Clarinette basse . Bassklarinette
Brynly Clarke, Bassoon . Basson. . Fagott
Barry Tuckwell, Horn . Cor . Horn
Elgar Howarth, Trumpet . Trompette . Trompete
David Purser, Trombone . Trombonne . Posaune
John Constable, Piano . Piano . Klavier
Howard Shelley, Celeste . Celesta . Celesta
Sidonie Goossens, Harp . Harpe . Harfe
James Holland, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
David Johnston, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
Terence Emery, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
John Donaldson, Percussion, Marimba . Percussion, Marimba . Schlagzeug, Marimba
* Robert Howes, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
* Stephen Henderson, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
* John Beadle, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug
* Anne Collis, Percussion . Percussion . Schlagzeug

" L'Usignolo dell'lmperatore

Giacomo Carissimi, "Jephte" (Arranged by Hans Werner Henze)

A well-known Old Testament story is that of Jephthah and of how he found himself forced to sacrifice his daughter in consequence of a vow he had rashly made. It is told in Judges 11:1-40, but outside the Bible, too, the myth recurs in various forms, e.g. in Mozart's Idomeneo. Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674) molded it into his masterpiece, Jephte. Probably composed for performance during Lent, it is an oratorio, a kind of large-scale cantata or, more strictly speaking, a type of church opera distinguished from its theatrical counterparts only by the fact that it was not produced in costume and with scenery on a stage. It was a new form which Carissimi, the outstanding Italian composer between Monteverdi and Alessandro Scarlatti, endowed with structural unity and brought to full perfection.

The oratorio was composed after Carissimi had been placed in charge of music at the church of Sant'Appolinare in Rome (1630). Twenty years later it was still so well known that the Jesuit scholar and musicologist Athanasius Kircher used it as an example complete with musical quotations in his Musurgia Universalis. He described it as being "succo et vivacitate plena" (pulsing with life and vitality), and may well have become acquainted with it at the socially fashionable Oratorio del Crocefisso di San Marcello; from here hand-written copies soon spread its fame across the Alps.

Despite its somewhat aristocratic origins, Jephte is really a popular work, not a work for the connoisseur. Its choruses have about them an elemental force reminiscent of Monteverdi's "Madrigals of War", while its arias do not as yet conform to the already popular "da capo" scheme, and are primarily aimed at expressing the words of the text as effectively as possible. The narrative aspect of the oratorio, i.e. the part of the "Historicus" of narrator, is kept deliberately simple and direct so as to hold the attention of the audience.

A glance at the artistic development of the composer Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) soon explains his interest in Carissimi's Jephte. He was a private pupil of Wolfgang Fortner at the Institute for Church Music at Heidelberg, and that is doubtless where he first met Carissimi's oratorio. When, later, he was working with the theatres at Constance and Wiesbaden and turning more and more to the theatre in his own music, the idea of his updating Carissimi's score began to seem to him as desirable as the modernization of Handel's oratorios had seemed to Mozart when he was involved with Baron van Swieten's Sunday concerts.

Henze left the vocal parts intact, and confined himself to expanding the orchestration in line with authentic baroque practice. What Carissimi gives to a handful of strings and a basso continuo - and even in those days other instruments were used, e.g. a continuo harp - Henze rescores for a colorful ensemble with four flutes (including piccolo, bass and double-bass flutes), mandolin, guitar, tenor banjo, harp, and various percussion instruments: marimbaphone, glockenspiel, crotales, boobam, tomtoms and kettle-drums. He explains his aims thus: ''All the instruments in my version have an Old Testament history behind them and date back to archaic times; yet thanks to a constant process of renewal and improvement, they are also the means of expression for the music of our own day. The sounds I have created with them evoke the feel and atmosphere of music in the Mediterranean world in biblical times, and in so doing my intention was to project the essence of Carissimi's score to our own day and make his musical tragedy of Jephthah and his daughter come alive in all its realism, glowing intensity and emotional power." The result is a masterly adaptation of the work of one composer by a later one. -- Albrecht Riethmiiller (Translation: John Bell)

HANS WERNER HENZE
It has always been to Henze's advantage that he has never committed himself to a particular direction in music. He has thus avoided any pressure to conform; in this way his works have avoided the process of stereotyping and labeling so dear to the general public. (Whether this has changed since the end of the 1960's, when Henze completed a move towards politically committed music with a communist coloring will be discussed in another connection.) Despite approaching, and experimenting with, the twelve-tone, and more specifically the serial, method, Henze (born in Gütersloh in 1926) has never really gone over to it completely. The fact that he emigrated to Italy as early as 1953 may partly have been because Henze felt the recent past still cast too deep a shadow on the Federal Republic of Germany; in musical terms, the move meant that Henze's sensuous approach to sound and his art felt more at home in a southern environment, and it also brought about a physical separation from the creative musical situation in West Germany of that period, from his teachers, such as Wolfgang Fortner, and from the centers of new music, in particular from the bastion of serial composition in Kranichstein/Darmstadt.

Henze rapidly acquired a reputation from the beginning of his compositional career at the end of the Second World War because he was in less danger than others of being caught between two fronts, and because his music appealed more directly to a larger public than the often esoteric, brittle style of many of his colleagues. Another, even more important reason for his rapid success was that by the end of the 1950's he had produced a rich variety of vocal and instrumental works, of which the operas "Konig Hirsch" and "Der Prinz von Homburg", ballets like "Undine", and (by 1955) four symphonies spring to mind, although these are only points of orientation in his larger creative landscape. Henze's search for an individual musical language has also been (mis)understood as a rejection of the principles of new music, and Ulrich Dibelius went so far in 1966 as to speak of Henze's "Neoromantic music". This classification was not new; in a lecture given in 1959, Henze remarked on the "suspicion of Romanticism" which was "so difficult to fend off" as one was not sure whether, "if it proved to be justified it would really displease one".

Henze, whose comments at that time tended to be rather extravagant, spoke in the middle of the fifties of his "longing for a full, wild euphony", which could only be satisfied by a "feeling of loneliness and freedom". Henze's compositional aims of that period are perhaps best described in his own words: he aimed at music in which "poetry and subject are at one with their realization in sound". Consequently he was commended for his taste for "the most delicate of poetry" and for lyrical expression - whatever may be meant by that -, for sophisticated sound, and above all, for cantabile expression, and he was soon seen as an "over-sensitive musician", as a "singer of lovely, often dangerously lovely, melodies", as Bernd Müller remarked on the occasion of the first performance of "Nachtstucke und Arien" in 1957. Thus, Hans Heinz Stukkenschmidt, a music critic who closely followed and propagated the development of new music in Germany after the Second World War, ended a portrait of Henze in the same year as follows: "He is the richest in talent and breadth of horizon among the Germans of his generation."

Hans Werner Henze, "Swann in Love"

Hans Werner Henze, "Katherina Blum"

The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum
(1975)

Directed by
Volker Schlöndorff &
Margarethe von Trotta

Based on the novel by
Heinrich Böll

Music by
Hans Werner Henze

Hans Werner Henze, "Essay on Pigs, V"

"tired starting up and end for the
time being"

the deceased na'ive one
can be approached by visitors
surrounded by a legend
the s-bahn goes on
into our images
[S-Babn: Berlin city railway, owned
by the East, but running in East
and West Berlin]
relaxed arrogance
vivid promises
monotony
berlin romantic
who has arranged it
it is becoming apparent
the whole thing was just an interval
between two moves of a game
from which you did not escape
there remains
an unknown store of energy
but as for love
it remains
within a space of time
which in every case is announced
beforehand
a sad noise
and the living together
nothing but the hollow mould of
actions
which we left behind
faultless sex determination
is guaranteed
between our solitude
and our dreams
a final quarrel has broken out
both have been and are
useful points of reference
but are hushed up
by hope
now the plan must be discussed
accurately and carefully
at last the obligation must be made
clear
reasonable solutions
can also hurt
uncertain have you become
of satisfactory experiences
and hope is
for long stages
merely a postponement
who can parachute
jump off
jump off
finished with moving trains
stop them
stop them
THEN l STOOD UP
and said
l surrender
that's all
but then I fired
according to the command

Hans Werner Henze, "Essay on Pigs, IV"

''farewell phrases"

it is not punishable
to have no farewell phrases
this statement is however relative
it is only relevant in relation
to other disciplinary measures
disposed of much too easily and
gently
to cure the bad conscience
thoroughly down to its roots
a striking contrast
but the dead are without virtue
at the parting
and indifferent
to the misery of glossing over
only for certain extravaganzas
are they brought up again
better would it be
if you went away
invisible are the knives
got lost
in the dead
but long lasts the silence
and to torture must be lovely
and the civil servant be
thorough
and to say it more harshly
is impossible
expert knowledge
rarer now
is replaced by despair
the fearless want to return
to silence
avant-garde right down to solitude
the age-old coldness
in short
you remain disposable
you have done your duty in every
respect
only you can't go on
let us not splint our fractures
let us not heal them prematurelyour
first-day report
did not allow for chains of accidents
anyhow: the war goes on
enriched by our newly acquired
devastations
and it is indeed possible
that other accidental structures
can also be exploited by similar
means
of course always only
corresponding to the head stand of
consciousness
(assuming
the effect is the same)
shout what should I shout today?
shout nothing,
nothing before the end of the stay
stones from words
one wanted to unleash

Hans Werner Henze, "Essay on Pigs, III"

"extended discourse for
duck decoy birdcall"

once it was said of him
that he was a quiet sort of man
preferred to listen
rather than speak
then again
that he was wide awake
simply awfully nice
was a sound sleeper
had kicked the bucket somewhere
after a short while
not here
some asked themselves
whether he would not rather have
gone
on the uncertain journey
into captivity
others said about him
that somewhere he had started
that regular brawl
(but how else could it start
-or are we up the polethat
society
of which we talk so much)
one had one's troubles with him
whose sensitivity lasted a night
through
who was so clever with late
questions
(all that very amiably)
thus too rumours can be undone
from this it follows
that he is empty now
now not asleep
on no account
he has changed step
no longer hesitating
no longer weighing up
and so it falls'away from him

Hans Werner Henze, "Essay on Pigs, II"

"assertion as self-assertion"

for you
all trees are burnt ones
the boats gunboats
but a rock is the necessity
to avoid naked stones
at times
all doors are dead
let us try
to make a raft from them
if each lies next to the other
in a well thought-out order
then perhaps
a stage of the journey can be
covered
yet the paleness
of the defence
persists
accidents
begin to meander
in you are conjured up
the images of the past
small symptoms of fatigue
everyday devastations
that is to say beauty
always recurring
a remaining behind
a brittle raft
stranded
in a state of speechlessness

Hans Werner Henze, "Essay on Pigs, I"

Liner Notes

Essay on Pigs
Poem by Gaston Salvatore (1968)
Roy Hart, voice
Philip Jones Brass Ensemble
English Chamber Orchestra
Hans Werner Henze, conductor

Gaston Salvatore (the author of the poem "Essay on Pigs") was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1941. He has been living in Berlin for some years and is taking an active part in the SDS (Socialist Student Movement). Salvatore wrote the poem in April 1968 and Henze began setting it to music in December 1968. The Orchestra in "Poem" consists in woodwind (with their doubling instruments and decoy calls), brass, strings, varied percussion, a beat organ and an electric guitar.

Essay on Pigs
your essays are
an aggregation difficult to penetrate
of conformity
polite arrangements
and dreams
very different (indifferent)
references
sometimes misleadingly dated

Hans Werner Henze, "Kammermusik" (Side B)

Liner Notes

HANS WERNER HENZE was born in Westphalia and began his formal studies at the Staatsmusikschyle in Braunschweig. After a period of military service he continued his studies privately with Wolfgang Fortner until in 1948 he was appointed musical adviser to the theatre in Konstanz in collaboration with Heinz Holpert. From 1950 to 1952 he was artistic director and conductor of the Wiesbaden ballet but then moved to Italy where he now lives permanently.

He is now established as one of the world's foremost composers whose works, which include operas, ballets, six symphonies,' choral and chamber music, are performed regularly in all the major music centres of the world.

Hans Werner Henze, "Kammermusik" (Side A)

SIDE 1
KAMMERMUSIK
In "Kammermusik" again we come close to ancient Greece. This time it is not in the way of an expressionistic glance onto broken sculptures in a November garden, or by ways of a dream of bodies, glittering sunlight, and monsters. This time it is an encounter between Germany and Greece in the vision of a poet who has clouds of madness around his head, and who stammers in fragments, with beautiful, seemingly dislocated, phrases. I can feel this link to theancient world, understand it. In our eyes our landscapes turn into hellenic features. A number of sketches for this work I made in Greece in the summer of 1958. When the work was completed, I dedicated it to Benjamin Britten. It was first performed in November 1958 in Hamburg, sung by Peter Pears. The guitar music was played by Julian Bream. I conducted members of the radio orchestra. 1963, 1 added an epilogue to it, on the occasion of my old friend Josef Rufer's 60th birthday. In this epilogue, I pick up the mood of the whole work once more and introduce a semi-quotation from SchOnberg's 1st chamber symphony as a sign to Rufer, whose life and thought are all most affectionately concerned with the late Viennese master.