HANS WERNER HENZE (b.1926): Symphony No. 8, Adagio, Fuge und Mänadentanz from Die Bassariden, Nachtstücke und Arien for Soprano and Orchestra.

Catalogue Number: 12J008

Label: Capriccio

Reference: 71 134

Format: CD

Price: $19.98

Description: At last, the missing Henze symphony is recorded. Dating from 1993, this is another work (remember Royal Winter Music?) inspired by Shakespeare, this time by "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The first movement is inspired by Oberon's challenge to Puck to search for the magic flower and the flurrying figurations and liquid quality of the music seems to depict Puck's "I'll put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes". The second movement, marked Ballabile, is balletic in clumsy and exquisite by turns, suggested as it was by Titania's attempted seduction of Bottom. The adagio finale turns out to be the source of all the material we've heard in the first two movements, tying up the work like Puck's speech "If we shadows have offended" at the end of the play. The couplings are the early (1957) Nachtstücke und Arien, three expressive and weighty nocturnes with two settings of Ingeborg Bachmann poems embedded - a work which caused Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono to exit after a few bars at the premiere, noses in the air, offended by the consonance of the music, and a 2005 adaptation of music from the third act of the opera Die Bassariden into a 25-minute suite at the request of conductor Christoph von Dohnányi German texts. Claudia Barainsky (soprano), Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne; Markus Stenz. SACD hybrid.

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