Royal Winter Music / Sonates d'après Shakespeare

Description

Hans Werner Henze. Royal Winter Music. Two Sonatas based on Shakespearean characters mark an important milestone in Stefano Grondona's recording career: after years of sustained engagement with this repertoire and public performances (approximately from 1982 to 1995), the musician returns to tackle this pivotal work in the 20th-century guitar repertoire. At the same time, in the manner and results of this journey, the recording reflects an oblique and less-traveled approach to compositions that, like this one, embody the particularities and contradictions of the more cultivated guitar repertoire. The character of this work, as Marek Orszulik has argued (Aspects of the Historical Development of the Guitar Repertoire. A Case Study of the Royal Winter Music by Hans Werner Henze, Sonatas on Shakespearean Characters, University of Alberta, 2016), reconciles the sonata, understood as a genre of large-scale form and monumental architecture, with the Character Piece, a rhapsodic, dramatic, and psychological composition. In the introductions to the printed editions published by Schott, Henze specifies that, through the Royal Winter Music cycle, he intended to engage a series of key characters from Shakespearean theater (to whom the different movements of the sonatas are dedicated), who appear and disappear through the sound textures of the guitar.