Three orchestral works by Hans Werner Henze that span fifty years, from the Piano Concerto No. 1 he wrote in 1950 at the age of 24 to Scorribanda sinfonica, commissioned by Norddeutscher Rundfunk for his 75th birthday in 2001. Between them stands Antifone of 1960, for eleven solo strings, winds and percussion.
Henze was born in Gütersloh on 1 July 1926 and died in Dresden on 27 October 2012. He studied with Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg from 1946 and settled in Italy in 1953. Here the NDR Sinfonieorchester plays under Peter Ruzicka, with Christopher Tainton as soloist in the concerto. Discogs gives the recording date as 24 May 2001, in Studio 10 of the NDR Funkhaus in Hamburg, with Christian Kühnke as engineer. The disc lasts just under 51 minutes.
Scorribanda sinfonica sopra la tomba di una Maratona, literally a symphonic bandit's raid on the tomb of a marathon, was written in the winter of 2000-2001 as a single Allegro con fuoco. It looks back at Maratona di danza, the stage work Henze wrote in the mid-1950s for Luchino Visconti. In his words, "elements from the older piece reappear on and off like shadows under the surface of the new one, more or less like vague memories." The NDR orchestra gave the premiere in Hamburg on 29 June 2001. Antifone, of about seventeen minutes, places its eleven solo strings against groups of winds and percussion, with saxophones, recorder and a piano with plucked strings in the score. Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker premiered it on 16 March 1962. The early concerto has three movements titled like a ballet, Entrée, Pas de deux and Coda. Noel Mewton-Wood played the first performance in Düsseldorf in 1952, with Henze conducting.
Henze described the images behind the new piece as young people suffering pain and despair in their struggle for survival in a barbarous, pitiless modern world. Heard after it, the 1950 concerto, with its ballet movement titles, takes the listener back half a century.
CD, Wergo WER 6657 2, released in 2003 in the series Hans Werner Henze at Wergo.
