One of last year’s CD highlights was Wergo’s recording of two of Hans Werner Henze’s most radiantly lyrical works, Being Beauteous and Kammermusik 1958, and another intensely beautiful vocal creation from the same phase in his development forms the centrepiece of soprano Juliane Banse’s disc with her husband, Christoph Poppen, conducting.
Composed in 1957, Nachtstücke und Arien is built around settings of two texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian poet who was perhaps Henze’s closest collaborator until her death in 1973, and the author of three of his opera librettos. The poems, Im Gewitter der Rosen (In the Storm of Roses) and Freies Geleit (Safe Conduct), describe the thoughts of lovers at night and the coming of dawn, and Henze separates them with three orchestral nocturnes, shimmering, neo-romantic interludes that offset the soaring soprano lines perfectly.
Ravishing though her performance of the Henze settings is, it’s a work in which Banse has to share the spotlight with the orchestra. But her voice is undoubtedly the centre of attention in the other two pieces, which were composed expressly for her. Aribert Reimann’s three expressionist settings of Sappho are very much a vehicle for her flexible, lustrous tone and fabulous articulacy, while Wolfgang Rihm’s Aria/Ariadne is a more ambitious work altogether. Designated as a “scenarium”, and originally performed in concert in 2002, it became one of his three monodramas that were staged under the title of Drei Frauen seven years later. Aria/Ariadne is based on a passage of Nietzsche – Ariadne’s Lament from the Dionysian Dithyrambs – which Rihm turns into a large-scale scena. The musical language hovers on the boundaries of tonality, while typically making darting allusions to a whole range of earlier musics, but it makes a stunning showcase for Banse’s very special vocal and dramatic gifts.
