Hans Werner Henze

With the Second and Tenth Symphonies, Marek Janowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin completed their recording of all the symphonies of Hans Werner Henze. More than fifty years separate the two works: the Second dates from 1949, the Tenth, Henze's last, from 1997-2000. The disc was placed on the German Record Critics' Award quarterly list 2/2014.

The Second was recorded on 28-29 August 2012 and the Tenth on 12-14 July 2013, in a coproduction with Deutschlandradio Kultur and ROC Berlin. Stefan Lang produced, Wolfram Nehls and Henri Thaon engineered the sessions with Florian B. Schmidt, who also edited and mastered, and Thomas Schulz wrote the notes in the 32-page booklet. The release came in time for Janowski's 75th birthday in February 2014, the year the German Record Critics' Award gave him an honorary prize for his Wagner and Henze recordings, among others.

The Second Symphony, for large orchestra, was commissioned by the South German Radio and premiered in Stuttgart the same year. It was Henze's first large-scale twelve-tone composition, written soon after he had briefly explored serialism with René Leibowitz at the Darmstadt courses, in three movements (Lento, Allegro; Allegro molto vivace; Adagio). He later called it a kind of “winter music, grey and sombre”, as if the experience of the war had begun to press for a response. The Tenth, also for large orchestra, has four movements named Ein Sturm, Ein Hymnus, Ein Tanz and Ein Traum (A Storm, A Hymn, A Dance, A Dream). At over 38 minutes it is more than twice the length of the Second.

The Tenth was born from a suggestion of the Swiss patron Paul Sacher, who in 1997, straight after the premiere of the Ninth, told Henze to write another symphony at once, to counter the old superstition about ninth and tenth symphonies. It reads as a liberation, from Beethoven as a model and from the lament of the Ninth, a tone with which Henze did not want his symphonic writing to end.

CD, Wergo WER 6725 2, released in 2014 in the Hans Werner Henze at Wergo series.