Hans Werner Henze:
Violin Concerto No. 2
Il Vitalino raddopiato
Peter Sheppard Skærved, violin
Omar Ebrahim, Spesaker
Longbow
Parnassus Ensemble London
Naxos CD 8.573289
It is hard to imagine two more contrasting pieces than the
works for violin and orchestra collected on this disc, although they were
written only 6 years apart. The disc is a wonderful showcase of Henze’s
inventiveness, range, and imagination.
Il Vitalino raddopiato
reflects Henze’s love of early music. It is based on a chaconne for violin and
continuo by the Italian Baroque composer Tomaso Vitali – in fact, it is
Vitali’s best known work and has seen various arrangments, including an
arrangement for violin and orchestra by
Respighi. This two movement work (whose title translates, roughly, as Vitalino redoubled or Vitalino renewed)
is a wonderful and charming piece. It is a tribute to Henze’s skill that it
does not come across as an exercise in neoclassicism and that the 27 minute
opening movement continually engages the listener. The cadenza and conclusion are
much less firmly grounded in the world of the Baroque, but still complement
the first movement well.
The Violin Concerto
No. 2, in contrast, is a more full-on experimental work. It is a violin
concerto in the sense that the solo violin is the dominant musical force and
there is a genuine dialog between violin and orchestra. But there are also some
more unusual elements, including the solo violinist declaiming the statement of
Kurt Gödel’s famous theorem proving the incompleteness of arithmetic while
playing the first cadenza. In addition to the logical violinist a baritone is
brought in to sing a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger that was apparently the
inspiration for the concerto.
This is heady stuff, very 1970’s. The vocal sections do not
work on their own terms – at least to my ear, speaking as someone with a
professional interest in mathematical logic. The effect is too portentous. But
the piece as a whole does, I think, work if the vocal sections are taken as
just another strand in the musical texture, rather than as a poem and a
theorem. Of course, that’s almost certainly not how Henze himself conceived of
them, but listeners do have the freedom to plot their own path through the
music.
Naxos are to be thanked for putting this disc out. The
playing and sound quality are superlative (strikingly the performance of the
violin concerto comes from a BBC concert in 1991), and the thoughtful liner
notes by Peter Sheppard Skærved are a welcome bonus. Sheppard Skærved
is an excellent violinist with a deep insight into Henze, with whom he
collaborated on both of these works and a number of others. Highly recommended.
