“Music is political whether you like it or not,” Hans Werner Henze memorably said. To mark the tenth anniversary of his death, Isang Enders and the WDR Symphony Orchestra have addressed themselves too the composer’s works for cello and on October 14 they are releasing the album “Ode to Henze” on the Berlin Classics label in a joint production with broadcaster WDR.
This album gives Isang Enders the opportunity to take a close look at Henze’s works for solo cello. “I asked myself why Henze was so little programmed after his death in 2012,” says the cellist of his inspiration to make this recording. He aims to make the composer relevant again, “on account of his undogmatic attitude to life and composing, but also with an ear open to his pacifist message”, which is more topical today than ever.
One of those works is his “Ode an den Westwind”, written in 1953. Henze perceived his contemporaries’ compositional radicalism in the shadow of war as hypocritical and distanced himself from the increasingly dogmatic avant-garde. The booklet to this album includes a reflective comment by media expert, musicologist and journalist Dr. Anna Schürmer, who notes that the deeply lyrical work, based on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s cycle of poems “Ode to the West Wind”, was written in the summer of 1953 in Sicily and on the island of Ischia – in Italy, in fact, which was to become Hans Werner Henze’s home after his break with the avant-garde of postwar Germany.
The “Englische Liebeslieder” were written by Hans Werner Henze for the WDR Symphony Orchestra, giving Isang Enders the opportunity to record the work using the score of the premiere – a truly complex score. “The work is almost unplayable,” says Isang Enders in conversation with Anna Schürmer, “and apart from that, the cello is almost inaudible on account of the huge dimensions of the orchestra.” Henze’s “English love songs” are directly related to “Introduktion, Thema und Variationen” for cello, harp and string orchestra. The soloist sees the gently ethereal tone of that piece as symbolic of a naively ironic view of life on the part of the composer: “Henze is looking back on a childhood he never had; full of emotions and colours.”
There is a wealth of feelings made into music in the “Trauer-Ode an Martina Geddes”. Hans Werner Henze composed his “funeral ode to Martina Geddes” in 1997 as a “commemoration of a revered and dearly loved friend, Prinzessin Margaret von Hessen und bei Rhein”.
The project called for constant attention and resilience. When the conductor went into Covid quarantine during the recording sessions, Jonathan Stockhammer was fortunately able to stand in for her. That was just about the time when Russian troops marched into Ukraine and began their war of aggression. Isang Enders brings to mind the work and the messages of declared pacifist Hans Werner Henze, making it clear that “every note brings its reward”.
