RIP Henze

[fftransform]

RIP Hans Werner Henze.  Not a personal favorite, but a major figure for many decades.

[ahinton]

I'd heard this sad news, too. Thanks for posting about it here. I'd thought of doing so myself but felt that, given that his output for piano is relatively slender (at least in terms of the sheer bewildering amount and variety of his work as a whole), there being the two concertos, a piano quintet and a not especially large amount of solo music, I refrained from doing so on the grounds that it might not register here as it would and indeed is doing elsewhere.

Who is playing on the extract that you provide here? That sonata, whilst relatively typical of Henze at the time of its composition, does now seem rather akin to a Robert Frost like "path not taken" in the greater scheme of things.

One of the most important stage composers of the latter half of the lat century, it's nevertheless his series of ten symphonies that seem to form a kind of backbone to his work and they span half of his life.

RIP indeed - and for the second time, one might say, given the coma in which he spent several months not so very long ago and from which he made a most remarkable and unexpected recovery.

Best,

Alistair