Henze: Violin & Viola Works

Album review

It's a safe bet that Hans Werner Henze's music for violin and piano, viola and piano, and solo violin, won't reach as wide an audience as an Nth collection of Mahler's symphonies, but for heaven's sake, let's have something new! And so here is a fine novelty, which follows the composer's creative life from 1946, for the Sonata for Violin and Piano (at the time he was just twenty) to 1999, the year of Peter Doll zum Abschied. There is a world between these two poles: the 1946 Sonata still bears the marks of Stravinsky and a touch of Bartók, while the two other short "memorial" pieces, Für Manfred (the famous German television producer who did so much for contemporary music, Manfred Gräter) and Peter Doll (in memory of the late director of Stuttgart Theatre) develop the most stripped-down, least-charged of Henze's language. Between these two poles, we hear the bitter Sonata for Solo Violin from 1977, austere, but still bearing the mark of a certain Italian something (Henze lived in Italy for many years), which is both lyrical and a little joyful; and the bigger Sonata for viola and piano dating from 1979, which presents an impressive counterpoint to the Sonata for Solo Violin, even though it was written so soon after. You could say that the first was "climbing" towards his ballet Orpheus, and the second was "unwinding" after. And finally, it is a pleasure to see the 1979 Sonata taken from the children's opera Pollicino, in which the listener is surprised to see a few counter-punctual and harmonic elements which wave, from afar, at Hindemith. © SM/Qobuz