It cannot have been an easy task to convey anything like the full range of Hans Werner Henze's music in a single portrait concert. There's no living composer of similar stature who has written so much, in so many genres, with such blithe disregard for musical trends and dogma. He has celebrated lyricism in an age when it was proscribed by the avant garde, composed operas when they were regarded as museums of the past, nailed his colours to the political mast when the musical establishment was doing its best to avoid such commitment. Henze's achievement is impossible to pigeonhole.
In their Festival Hall programme Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra concentrated on three facets of that teeming output. There was nothing operatic, but the neoclassical world of the early 60s was represented by the Fifth symphony and Ariosi, rarely heard orchestral settings of Tasso; the Eighth symphony defined the Bergian chromatics of his recent music; while in the choral Orpheus Behind the Wire, to sub-Brechtian texts by Edward Bond, there was an echo of the fierce political radicalism that dominated his music in the 70s.
Above all it was a superbly presented celebration of an endearing and endlessly intriguing personality, in whose music unevenness is part of the package. Not every work comes off. The Fifth symphony is a wonderfully exuberant orchestral showpiece, to which Knussen gave a really stylish finish, but Ariosi isn't totally successful - that sun-drenched Mediterranean sensibility is better represented in other pieces than in these slightly forced exchanges of solo soprano (Carol Farley here) and violin (Ernst Kovacic). Whatever one thinks of the sheer fluency of the orchestral writing in the Eighth, inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, there's sometimes too much of it; especially in the galumphing scherzo there are passages that overstay their welcome. Yet the BBC Symphony made light of those congested moments, and the exuberance and honesty of the writing, as in so much Henze, triumphs in the end.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
