Considering the length and fecundity of Hans Werner Henze’s composing career, the BBC’s Total Immersion weekend at the Barbican bore more of the hallmarks of a hasty dip. A concert here, a film there: not much more. Yet Henze is so complete a musician, such an embodiment of the last century’s crises (artistic and political), that when one work is heard you also hear the seeds of the rest. He’s the organic composer par excellence.
The absorbing concert on Saturday evening, in Henze’s presence, shunted us from the serial explorations of the 1948 piano variations to his recent Elogium musicum, a blazingly personal work of homage and memorial. Starting with piano music seemed odd, yet the half-hour selection, magisterially dispatched by Huw Watkins, told its own story of serialism warmed by tonal memories and structures transfigured by fantasy. No barbed-wired avant-gardist could have composed the 1981 Cherubino, ten tender minutes of Mozart recollected in a dream.
After Watkins’s piano, Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra arrived for more fascinating time-travelling. More than 40 years separated Henze’s Fourth Symphony from the brief, questing harmonies of Fraternit?, written with cautious hope for the new millennium. Yet these honed performances revealed the same orchestral magician, grounded in Austro-German traditions but warmed by Italian song and light. Henze spun the symphony from his opera K?nig Hirsch, pitching the listener into the opera’s forest, where the hero king turns himself into a stag. In Knussen’s loving hands, every musical transformation convinced.
It would be unrealistic to expect Henze to compose with identical power in his eighties, and not in rude health. A secular requiem for chorus and orchestra, with a commissioned Latin text by the poet Franco Serpa, Elogium musicum lacked the sensuous complexity of musical thought that has made the best of Henze so bewitching. Impossible, though, not to be moved by his raw response to the death of his long-time partner Fausto Moroni, or the memory trail of musical heroes, predominantly Stravinsky.
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Behind the orchestra, the BBC Symphony Chorus mourned, raged, and gave praise. So did we, in front.