It was on this day, 100 years ago, that German composer Hans Werner Henze was born. He’s not a composer i’ve explored very much on 5:4, and i’ve often felt sad about that, as he’s one of my favourite composers, and his music occupies a larger-than-average proportion of my music collection. Apropos: while recordings of Henze’s music are plentiful, they’re primarily split between two labels. The first is Deutsche Grammophon, who put out a whole string of albums through the ’60s and ’70s featuring Henze himself as conductor. The other is Wergo, who took over in the 1980s, and have kept releasing recordings of Henze’s music ever since, the most recent in 2020. Deutsche Grammophon took all of their recordings and boxed them up in 1996 to form The Henze Collection, and i’ve been delighted to see that, to mark Henze’s centenary, Wergo is about to do the same.
Starting next month (is it churlish to ask why not this month?), Wergo will start releasing their Hans Werner Henze Edition, a series of five box sets that will compile all of their recordings, some of which have been unavailable for many years. The first, released in August, will be Sinfonia, containing all 10 symphonies – featuring the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marek Janowski – after which will come Orchestra (orchestral works and concertos), Camera (chamber and piano music), Voce (vocal works) and finally Teatro (stage works), which will include a previously unreleased recording of the opera Der Prinz der Homburg.
i’m planning to explore each of these boxes as they’re released, and thereby finally give Henze the amount of attention on 5:4 that his stunningly radical music rightfully deserves. It would have been nice to see concert halls filling up their programmes with Henze’s music to mark his centenary, but predictably, that would simply be asking far too much. For now, this will have to do – but it’s a hell of a lot to look forward to and get excited about.
Happy Birthday, Hans!
