Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)
Symphony No 1 (1947)
Now in his eighties, Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) remains one of the giants of contemporary music today. Few 20th century composers have managed so well to combine gorgeous lyricism with a command of both traditional and serial techniques, fusing them with neoclassicism to produce a swathe of sumptuous music spanning over sixty years.
Henze studied with René Leibowitz (1913-72) a Polish-born pupil of Ravel deeply versed in Viennese serialism, whose other most famous student was Boulez. “In my world,” Henze had observed, “old forms strive to regain significance, even when the modern sound or timbres rarely permit them to surface audibly.
“It’s like a Classical ideal of beauty: no longer attainable, yet still visible from a great distance, stirring dream-like memories.”
Henze grew up in a Germany riven by Nazism and World War Two. Already a member of the Hitler Youth, he served in the Wehrmacht for the war’s dying months.
Such grisly experiences deeply affected his attitude to his music, although they scarcely show in his First Symphony, composed in 1947. Yet they clearly infused his bitter and violent Second Symphony, “utterly grey and gloomy, as though my experience of the war was responding to a demand in my music.”
By contrast, Henze’s First Symphony is almost pastorally cheerful and extrovert. Its premiere in 1948 was not an unmitigated success, but the work’s audible rapture was (unwittingly) appropriate, for “in the festival canteen, I met my first real love; and I now had eyes for nothing else. I suddenly knew where I belonged: he taught me tenderness; and for the first time in my life, I was happy.”
The originally four-movement symphony should have been heard at Darmstadt in 1947, with Hermann Scherchen conducting. But after a crisis (the watery ink faded on the orchestral parts and the 21 year old composer spent all night re-inking and re-copying), only the slow movement was played. The symphony was first heard a year later, conducted (rather unsympathetically) by Henze’s other great teacher, Wolfgang Fortner. The Lento is the only bit of the original that survives, largely unaltered, today.
“Throughout the rehearsals I became grimly conscious of the weaknesses of this frivolous, infantile composition,” he recalled. Henze junked the original (though revamped some of its melodic and rhythmic material), also reducing its forces prior to conducting tonight’s 16-minute chamber version with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1963.
The aerated woodwind aubade that opens the Allegretto con grazia, with its pellucid textures and sudden climaxes, call to mind the music of Michael Tippett. Climaxes come and go, but the atmosphere is delicate, shifting and (already) rather nocturnal, with percussive interjections from piano and harp, plus alternating whispers of flute, clarinet and wafting brass.
Stravinsky presides over the Lento: the Russian, along with Hindemith, was audibly a key influence on the young Henze. A viola solo and rocking flute import an impressionistic quality that feels more like Paris than Berlin. It has often been said that the music of Henze, who soon afterwards made his main home on the Bay of Naples, suggests Southern European warmth as much as any Austro-German influence.
The Allegro con moto imports new rhythmic urgency, emphasised by demonic, syncopated brassy outbursts and skitterings of busy, nervy woodwind. Here one senses Henze the master of counterpoint, so that the movement’s underlying beauty, with its soft soli, is not compromised by such terse argumentative outbreaks. The bassoon seems to herald a new direction, but then suddenly the symphony is over.
© Roderic Dunnett
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1899)
Rheinlegendchen
Verlorne Müh
Das irdische Leben
Wer hat dies Liedlien erdacht?
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Lob des hohen Verstandes
Mahler’s discovery in 1887 of Des Knaben Wunderhorn – Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s anthology of German folk poetry published in two volumes in 1805 and 1808 respectively – was a turning point in his development. It didn’t mean a complete change of direction, since he had long favoured the folk idiom in the texts he chose (or even wrote) for song-setting. But in Des Knaben Wunderhorn he found a collection of such breadth, depth and variety that it took him thirteen years or more, not only in his songs but also in his symphonies, to realise its creative potential.
Rheinlegendchen – written originally for voice and piano in 1893 but first published, like the other songs in this group, among the ten Wunderhorn settings for voice and orchestra in 1899 – is a particularly delightful example in its naive sentiment and its playful Ländler rhythms combined with teasingly but not incongruously sophisticated harmonies. The melodic material was actually in Mahler’s mind before he discovered the words to go with it. What pleased him about his setting was, he said, its “childish, mischievous and heartfelt” qualities and the “gentle and sunny”colouring of the accompaniment. The slightly earlier Verlorne Müh’ is another Ländler but one concerned not so much with rhythmic and harmonic wit as with characterisation: it is a meeting of the unaware with the ungracious in a decidedly one-sided conversation.
Das irdische Leben was written at much the same time as Rheinlegendchen and is as starkly realistic as the other is fanciful. With its tragic outcome implicit from the start in its Lydian minor harmonies, it sets what the composer described as “the tortured and anguished cries of the child” and “the slow monotonous replies of the mother” against an accompaniment that “roars and whistles like a storm” (so memorably in fact that it found its way into the Purgatorio third movement of the Tenth Symphony seventeen years later).
Perhaps the most attractive and certainly the shortest of the six songs in the present selection, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht? runs with irresistible charm on the whistling tune that so cheerfully pervades the accompaniment and so effectively joins the vocal part at the end of the first and last stanzas. The longest and musically the most ambitious is Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen. Mahler himself apparently felt that it is not a ghost that knocks on the door in the middle of the night but the lover in reality anticipating his early death on the battlefield. Either way, it is an appropriately eerie setting illuminated by brass scoring which, though the fanfares sound from beyond the grave, are magically seductive in effect.
Lob des hohen Verstandes – a clear reference to which introduces the high-flown counterpoint of the Finale of the Fifth Symphony – is directed at the composer’s uncomprehending critics. The allusion to Die Meistersinger on the words “Täten ein Wett’ anschlagen,” discreetly ironic as it is, probably escaped even the biggest ears of the objects of Mahler’s wickedly satirical caricature.
© Gerald Larner
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 73 (1877)
Allegro non troppo
Adagio non troppo
Allegretto grazioso
Allegro con spirito
Though Brahms saw himself as a summer composer, who spent the rest of the year revising, perfecting and playing what he had written on his holidays from Vienna, not all his music sounds as summery as his Symphony No 2. Inspired, like his Violin Concerto (also in D major), by the beauty of Lake Wörth in southern Austria - Alban Berg, some sixty years later, would compose his own violin concerto on the opposite shore of the same lake - has a luminosity of texture, a melodic serenity, and a rhythmic impulse of a very special sort, which Brahms would never again achieve to quite such idyllic effect. To call it carefree might seem to be stretching a point, but it is a masterpiece as light-hearted as Brahms ever produced, and its closing pages possess a jubilation, a sense of banners unfurling, almost unique in his output.
The swiftness with which he completed it in 1877 - a year after the mighty labour pains of the Symphony No 1 - speaks for itself. Yet, in its first two movements, it does not lack spaciousness. The unhurried opening notes - a swaying phrase for cellos and basses, a sweet shimmer of horn tone - suggest the scope of the music to follow. A soft but not ominous roll on the kettledrums and a melody airily floated by the violins sustain the impression of a symphony at ease with itself, yet in spite of its tranquillity the first movement does have a growing intensity of expression and a very real point of climax where the opening horn call is dissonantly ground out by the trombones, which are sparingly employed in this work but always to great effect. The intensity, however, is mostly held in check by the movement’s prevailing waltz-like pulse; and the coda, when it arrives, is filled with teasing understatements, including some whimsical - and certainly unexpected - harbingers of neo-Stravinsky in the woodwind.
Brahmsian sunshine being dependent on Brahmsian shadow, the adagio begins darkly with the sound of cello and bassoon tone in stark counterpoint, the instruments unblended and proceeding in contrary motion. The key is now B major, but it sounds almost like B minor, the effect suggestive perhaps of a solitary walk in a dense forest, with sunlight gleaming through the trees. But if the slow movement has its sombre side, the third movement - a superb example of the sort of semi-scherzo, with a charming flick on the third beat and with two faster-paced trio sections - is amiably bucolic. The quietly monochrome start of the finale gives little hint of the merriment to follow. But it makes the blaze of colour, when it bursts forth, all the more resplendent.
© Conrad Wilson
Ticciati makes his hotly-anticipated debut as Principal Conductor with two programmes that span two centuries of song, scena, symphony and theatre. These are big concerts in every way. Pairing the expansive riches of Brahms with the intense, dark drama of Mahler’s songs makes for a gripping contrast. Kožená, one of the world’s greatest singers, is sure to give spine-tingling interpretations.
Sir Charles Mackerras conducts Brahms' Symphony No 2 in D major, Op 73

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