HANS WERNER HENZE (1926–2012) - Tristan : Preludes for Piano, Electronic Tapes and Orchestra ; GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911) - Adagio from Symphony No. 10, transcribed for piano by RONALD STEVENSON (1928–2015) ; RICHARD WAGNER (1813–83) - Tristan und Isolde - Prelude, transcribed for piano by ZOLTÁN KOCSIS (1952–2016) ; FRANZ LISZT (1811–86) - Liebestraum No. 3 in A-Flat Major, S. 541/3, Harmonies du soir (No. 11 from Études d’exécution transcendante). Igor Levit piano; Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Franz Welser-Möst conductor (Henze)

Description: Almost unbelievably, this is the only recording of this major work since the 1977 DG one with Homero Francesch, with the composer conducting the WDR Symphony Orchestra. Tristan is one of Henze’s most personal works, certainly of this experimental, politically involved stage of his career, and among the most emotionally wrenching and expressively powerful. Described by the composer as “Preludes for piano, tape and orchestra”, the six-movement, 45-minute work is a hybrid of highly expressive piano and orchestral miniatures, piano concerto, symphonic canvas, and theatre piece. The work was composed at a time of great personal trauma for Henze. In June, 1973, the dancer and choreographer who had suggested the idea of a ballet on Tristan and Isolde to Henze, died tragically and bizarrely of an allergic reaction to a sleeping pill. In September, Pinochet's junta took over Chile; Henze remembered that "we heard directly from Santiago about mass arrests, executions, the death of Neruda and the destruction of his house, burning of his books, the death of Victor Jara [singer, theatre director, political activist] under torture." W. H. Auden, a poet whom Henze had greatly admired (he met him after moving to Ischia, where Auden maintained a summer home, and set three of his poems in 1983), died later that month, and in October one of the composer’s closest friends, and frequent collaborator, Ingeborg Bachmann, died as a result of burns that she had suffered in a fire. Henze was plunged into a deep psychological crisis. He finally completed the work in Venice, where Wagner had died in 1883, in a state of deep grief which permeates the entire score. In response to the original idea of a ballet, Henze had already prepared three tapes with Peter Zinovieff (1933–2021), a composer and sound engineer who was one of the pioneers of electronic music in London, and whose company's synthesisers were used by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and others. He then wrote the virtuosic orchestral parts on the basis of the electronic tracks.  He had already begun an initial Prelude for piano solo and to this he now added two more preludes, so that the work finally grew to a total of six movements. The first movement, Prologue, is mostly for piano solo. Restless and questioning, it is punctuated by a few orchestral gestures. At the end, it suddenly resolves into a gorgeous, glowing chord, which leads into the second section, "Lament", which is the closest thing to a Darmstadt-approved piano concerto in the piece, featuring both soloist and orchestra throughout. This movement has all the hallmarks of a symphonic narrative, with powerful climaxes, including a twice repeated sequence of massive "Turangalîla" chords from the brass, interspersed with passages of mysterious tenebrosity. After hovering in the vicinity of atonality for some six minutes of foreboding menace, punctuated by outbursts of monumental violence, the third movement, Preludes and Variations, begins with a series of solo piano episodes, introverted and sombre, and containing some of the most beautiful music in the work. When the orchestra enters, it is likewise restrained and undemonstrative, in glittering, gossamer textures. A powerful climax builds, and the piano returns; then the orchestra again in glittering, insubstantial textures, though out of this comes a dramatic master-stroke - the eruption of the opening gesture of Brahms' First Symphony, quoted verbatim. Brahms, as Wagner's nemesis symbolises both Henze’s uneasy relationship (at this stage of his career) with Romanticism, and his ambivalence toward Wagner, embraced by the Nazis and presuming to offer, in Tristan und Isolde, a complete and perfect expression of a story of love and death, which was not the message Henze was trying to convey. The fourth movement, Tristan's Folly, is the physical climax of the work, a monumental concertante orchestral section in which the second phrase of the Brahms is heard, alongside the most explicit references to Wagner's Tristan, a passage also eerily reminiscent of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th, the pylonic Messiaenic chords now hammered out on the piano, and a truly terrifying final climax. The orchestral fifth movement, subdivided into sections which Henze called a series of “burlesque dance pieces” - a waltz, alla turca, and marcia - “tormenting, reeling hallucinations and grotesques … which seem distorted as if in a grimace, and barely recognizable”, is like a bizarre, distorted Mahlerian scherzo. At the movement’s final climax, an electronically distorted recording of Wagner’s opera meshes with what Henze called “a terrible scream on the part of the whole of the orchestra … no longer simply that of Isolde or Tristan, but of the whole suffering world, which seems to burst the bounds of concert music. The soloist re-enters the stage, sounding devastated, shattered, and exhausted. Building a vehement protest against the preceding violence, and then meditating on the work’s themes in music of extraordinary beauty, the final set of solo "preludes" is as expressive and eloquent as anything else in the work. After eight minutes of this heartbroken, heartbreaking music, which could stand alone as a major piano work in its own right, the piano reaches its conclusion, and over an electronically amplified heartbeat a child’s voice—that of Zinovieff’s son, Kolinka—reads a passage from Hilaire Belloc's English translation of French mediævalist Joseph Bédier's reconstruction of the Mediæval source text, "Romance of Tristan and Iseult", describing Isolde’s death. Following this emotionally shattering coup de théâtre, orchestra and pianist re-enter for the final time, in a long, resigned "drawing-down of blinds" coda, finally ending this extraordinary piece with a radiant, yet still ambiguous, "Liebestod". The other main work here is Ronald Stevenson's masterly concert transcription of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony for solo piano, which makes of its unlikely subject for such treatment a virtuoso work conceived in terms of the piano. Stevenson’s encyclopædic knowledge of all aspects of the piano has never been more breathtakingly displayed. His use of broken chords, suspensions, grace notes, voice leading and the harmonic balancing of chords, articulation, and pedalling to emulate - to an uncanny degree - the vastly varied character of orchestral instruments and sonorities, is unique in its scope and complete command of his resources. Liszt’s nocturne in A flat major – his Liebestraum no. 3 – derives from a setting of melancholic lines by Ferdinand Freiligrath: “Oh, love as long as you can love! / Oh, love as long as you could crave! / That hour is fast approaching when / You’ll stand and weep beside the grave!” Only in Harmonies du soir, the eleventh of Liszt’s twelve Études d’exécution transcendante, is there any sense of reconciliation, a peaceful counterweight to the ecstasies and nightmares experienced by those Wagnerian and Mahlerian figures who in Wagner’s own words are “devoted to the night”. 2CDs.