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Thursday, December 1, 2022

Hans Werner Henze - Symphonies Nos. 2 & 10 (Marek Janowski)


Information

Composer: Hans Werner Henze
  1. Symphony No. 2: I. Lento - Allegro
  2. Symphony No. 2: II. Allegro molto vivace
  3. Symphony No. 2: III. Adagio
  4. Symphony No. 10: I. Ein Sturm
  5. Symphony No. 10: II. Ein Hymnus
  6. Symphony No. 10: III. Ein Tanz
  7. Symphony No. 10: IV. Ein Traum

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Marek Janowski, conductor

Date: 2014
Label: Wergo

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Review

Wergo’s cycle of Henze’s symphonies is now done, and more complete than any rival with its inclusion of the composer’s final essay in the genre, the Tenth, which is accoutred with lots of the things that we used to think make a symphony – four movements, with an event-laden first, slow and string-led second, dancing third and grand, summatory finale – without working through, at any rate not yet to me, the more intrinsically ‘symphonic’ quality of a narrative with a necessary end-point. For all its percussively enriched glitter, Henze’s later music demands we listen through some seriously opaque textures which may look more enticing on the page than they sound, and which Janowski and the Berlin RSO work hard to clarify while skirting the expressive compulsion that sets Henze so self-consciously within the German tradition and could be heard in the 2004 performances (I haven’t heard Friedemann Layer’s recording – Accord, 2/06) given by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Rattle, who commissioned what became the first movement and who may or may not be the latent subject of the Tenth (Henze remained cagey about this, dedicating the full work to Paul Sacher).

In fact Sacher is brought more readily to mind by the taut, three-movement Second Symphony (1949), written hot on the tail of similarly proportioned works by Honegger, Britten, Rachmaninov and others, and sharing with them a vivid sense of violent response to external catastrophe. Janowski’s recording is quicker and again acoustically clearer than the composer’s own (with the Berlin Philharmonic) but, as with his recent Bruckner and Wagner cycles, the skilfully engineered pursuit and attainment of an objective viewpoint comes with its own price. From his earliest music onwards Henze’s joy is palpable in telling real stories, not making meta-music, however anguished the idiom or subject-matter. Janowski offers more abstracted pleasures.

-- Peter Quantrill, Gramophone


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Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer. His large oeuvre of works is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. Henze was also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. An avowed Marxist and member of the Italian Communist Party, Henze produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.

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Marek Janowski (born 18 February 1939 in Warsaw) is a Polish-born German conductor. He has led the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (1983-87), Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne (1986-90), Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (1984-2000), Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra (2000-09), Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (2002-16), and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (2005-12). Janowski is currently chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic. He has made a number of operatic recordings, including the first digital recording of the complete Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle for RCA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek_Janowski

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