The doyen of German composers, Hans Werner Henze, celebrated his 80th birthday three and a half years ago, but that event went almost unnoticed by Britain's generally anniversary-obsessed classical musical establishment, and particularly our opera companies. Still, Henze is the world's most successful and productive composer of operas, with a tally of 12 works established on the fringes, at least, of the international repertoire.
Four years ago, the composer suffered an illness that many thought would be his last, but he recovered and has continued to write music on a grand scale. His most recent opera, Phaedra, completed after his recovery and premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2007, has its first UK performance at the Barbican Hall tonight. English National Opera will unveil a new production (by Fiona Shaw) of his first English opera, Elegy for Young Lovers, at the Young Vic this spring. Belatedly, Henze is getting the attention here that his music merits.
It was 57 years ago that Henze, disgusted with political developments and wilful amnesia about his native Germany's recent Nazi past, made a demonstrative move to Italy, where he has been feted by the political left, but only cursorily acknowledged by the musical establishment. Last weekend, I went to Rome for the world premiere of - astonishingly - his first Italian commission, Opfergang (a title borrowed from Veit Harlan's 1944 film, known in English as The Great Sacrifice), a mini "concert opera" or "scenic concerto" for two solo voices (tenor and bass), vocal quartet, solo piano and large orchestra, including a characteristically exotic array of percussion: chocalho (a Brazilian shaking stick), crotales (tiny tuned cymbals played like a xylophone), bongos and Chinese cymbals. Henze wrote the work, in 2008-09, as the fulfilment of a 50-year ambition to set Franz Werfel's poem Das Opfer (The Sacrifice). It was also written for the Royal Opera's Antonio Pappano, in his other guise as musical director of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. John Tomlinson and Ian Bostridge were the singers of the principal characters of Werfel's poem (the Stranger and the Little White and Well-Groomed Dog), so, with luck, we won't have to wait too long before Opfergang is performed over here.
Werfel is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of the 1942 novel The Song of Bernadette, which became a cult film the following year. A Jewish refugee from Nazi-annexed Austria, he was the lover and eventual third husband of Alma Gropius, Gustav Mahler's widow, a key figure in the vibrant artistic and literary milieu of 1920s Vienna. His poem tells of an isolated, self-hating social outcast (The Stranger) "adopted" by a dog he encounters in the street that has dreamt about a new master. In a wanton fit of rage, the Stranger kills the dog, whose ghost returns to haunt him. Schoenberg's Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire, and Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, are Opfergang's obvious antecedents, but Henze's eclectic idiom - its lyrical, Italianate passages always setting him apart from the German mainstream - still encompasses new-sounding textures and timbres, his ear for beguiling instrumental combinations apparently enriched by age and experience. Although the Roman audience became restless after 20 minutes, Henze's invention and pacing hardly flags throughout the 50-minute duration. Tomlinson, though grizzled and worn of voice, sings powerfully in the Stranger's declamatory music, while Bostridge has found one of his most congenial parts in the Little White and Well-Groomed Dog. Pappano, simultaneously conducting and accompanying the recitative sections, proved the evening's linchpin, and one hopes his record company, EMI, might issue the radio recording.
Back in London, Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra began 2010 with a concert performance of Richard Strauss's 1909 shocker, Elektra, resounding around the Barbican Hall with sound and fury. It was almost as exhausting to listen to as it must have been to play and sing.
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Unusually, Gergiev chose to give the score complete - microphones were in place, so this and Thursday's repeat performance are probably destined for the orchestra's LSO Live label - but neither Strauss nor his protagonist on this occasion, the American not-quite-soprano Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, were done favours by opening out cuts approved and conducted by the composer himself.
Gergiev is not one of those Strauss conductors who ratchets up the tension throughout the opera's unbroken 100-minute duration towards Elektra's maniacally triumphant dance of revenge after her brother's murder of her mother, Clytemnestra. The Russian climaxes in the opera's opening bars, hammering out Strauss's Agamemnon motif with an intensity that certainly makes the audience sit up. There were moments of repose in his performance, notably the raptly beautiful, almost incestuous, recognition scene when the Stranger reveals himself to be Elektra's long-lost brother Orestes (nobly sung by Matthias Goerne). The prevailing tone, however, was no-holds-barred violence and dissonance: the LSO played Strauss's score brilliantly, but, as usual under this conductor, overloudly, causing Charbonnet, Angela Denoke (as an affecting but squally Chry-sothemis) and even Felicity Palmer (a seasoned Clytemnestra) to force their voices.
Elektra doesn't have to sound like this, but it needs a conductor more versed in Strauss - who cared about words and wanted them to be heard. This was a roller-coaster event, like so many of Gergiev's LSO concerts. His noisy reading of the score - contra-dicting Strauss's instruction that Elektra should be conducted like Mendelssohn's fairy music - takes some of the blame for that.