Henze: Guitar Music, Vol. 1

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Cat No: 8557344

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Release Date: 01 April 2006

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313234424

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: HENZE

Description
Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)Guitar Music, Vol. 1 There can be few other living composers who have had suchremarkable success with an extraordinary quantity of music in all genres. Abrief glance at Henze's catalogue outlines a formidable series of symphonies, stageworks (both opera and ballet), concertos and quartets, and it is on theselarge-scale and solidly Teutonic structures, often unconventional in formal designand personal in their approach, that his stature as one of Europe's foremostcomposers rests.Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliestmusical training against the background of Nazism, becoming a reluctant recruitinto the Hitler Youth movement and, in 1944, serving as a radio operator with aPanzer division. After the war he returned to his formal education, studyingfirst with Wolfgang Fortner, and later with Rene Leibowitz in Darmstadt and Paris, where he encountered serial techniques. It was, however, the music of Stravinsky, Hindemithand Schoenberg that Henze turned to as models for his earliest neo-classicalpieces whose innate lyricism was to mark his oeuvre across a sixty-year composingcareer. Both his first Violin Concerto and First Symphony of 1947quickly established Henze as Germany's answer to the musical vacuum resulting fromthe aftermath of Nazism.Unhappy with post war social attitudes and ashamed of Germany's recent past he moved to Italy in 1953; first to Ischia, then Naples, and eventuallysettling near Rome. From this southern move a new, sunny radiance filtered intohis compositions that generated a sequence of stage works beginning in 1955with Konig Hirsch (King Stag) and culminating, ten years later, with hisunparalleled operatic success The Bassarids. From the late 1960s therefollowed a series of politically motivated works (with overtly communistsympathies), that included the ill fated Hamburg premiere of his oratorio TheRaft of the Medusa, the chamber piece El Cimarron and his opera LaCubana. As well as these large-scale 'public' works Henze found time in the1970s for a number of more private projects, including three string quartets,and his two Shakespearean themed guitar sonatas.This Second Sonata on Shakespearean Characters datesfrom 1978-79 and, like the first from three years earlier, was prompted by thedistinguished guitarist Julian Bream. The three character studies from the secondgroup complete a cycle of nine solo guitar pieces (six in the first set) thatbegin with a mad king and end with a mad queen. Henze makes virtuosic demands inall of these works, extending the boundaries of guitar technique in acomprehensive survey that brings to mind, on a different level, the greatkeyboard works by Bach or Beethoven. Indeed, when Julian Bream first approachedHenze for a solo guitar work he had jokingly suggested a piece on the scale ofBeethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata.In 'Sir Andrew Aguecheek' Henze uses a kind of additivevariation form to portray the gullible and melancholy knight from TwelfthNight wh
Tracklisting