Page 42 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

The conductor Marin Alsop has just ended her tenure as the music director of the
Baltimore Symphony, the first woman in that position at one of the largest American
ensembles. But she’s hardly through innovating, as in this powerful take on works by
Hans Werner Henze.

Henze, commonly programmed in Europe, is not often played in the United States,
where his reputation is unsteady; he also paid for his wide aesthetic range.
“Nachtstücke und Arien,” in which tonal melody coexists with dense abandon,
scandalized radicals like Pierre Boulez when it premiered in 1957.

With her Vienna orchestra joined by the soprano Juliane Banse, Alsop has the
measure of its mournful beauty; in the first movement, early melodies for the winds
have a relaxed, lounging quality, often set against nervier string writing. But this
reading is still plenty severe in the movement’s moments of massed-pitch frenzy. All
of the Henze pieces on this set — which also includes “Los Caprichos” and, with the
cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, “Englische Liebeslieder” — have been well recorded in
recent years on the Wergo label. But some of those crisp takes can sound as though
they’re still trying to redeem Henze for Boulez’s starker ears. As Alsop makes clear,
that’s not the only way to hear him. SETH COLTER WALLS

‘Primavera II: The Rabbits’

Matt Haimovitz, cello (Pentatone)
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