Wegbegleiter – Anssi Karttunen und Hans Werner Henze

Companions – Anssi Karttunen und Hans Werner Henze

In 2019, Wergo released a portrait CD including Anssi Karttunen’s recordings of Hans Werner Henze’s English Love Songs with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Oliver Knussen.

It is not only the three artists who shared a long-lasting friendship and working relationship; Hans Werner Henze and Anssi Karttunen were and are long-lasting companions for us, too. In 2004, Anssi Karttunen was one of our first artists, impressing us with his insatiable musical curiosity, which most recently has led to a collaboration with Led Zeppelin legend John Paul Jones. We had the pleasure of working with Hans Werner Henze in the preparations for the concerts in celebration of his 80th birthday in 2006, and continued our relationship until his death in 2012. He was one of the first composers for whom we worked, laying the foundation for a particularly important focus of our activities. For our magazine, Anssi Karttunen reminisces on his encounter with Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen, and on the special rehearsal work for the English Love Songs.

I met both Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen for the first time and at the same time after a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the end of 1980s. In 1996, Olly helped me to invite Mr Henze to the Suvisoitto Festival in Finland as a composer in residence, after which we remained friends until the end of both their lives. At the festival I played Introduction, Theme andVariations which is based on the movement that Hans Werner Henze took out of his original Seven LoveSongs. After that he asked me every time we met if I could also play the English Love Songs. I took out the music every time but felt that the piece was so incredibly difficult and problematic that I couldn’t imagine how to do it justice or how to have it be heard through the orchestra for that matter. When Mr Henze died, Olly called and asked me if I would play with him and the BBCSO the English Love Songs in an all Henze concert. I heard myself say without hesitation that naturally I would love to. I realised that somehow the situation had changed. The piece did still look difficult, but now that the composer wasn’t with us anymore, the piece belonged to the history of music and it didn’t seem right to be afraid of it.

I will never forget the rehearsals for this concert with Olly. I had of course played many other concertos with him and knew that he could make the most complex pieces feel perfectly natural. He could make Carter breathe like Puccini, he could bring out the genius of Bloch in Schelomo, he could make the Schumann concerto sound as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. But Henze is yet another cup of tea, he orchestrates even a cello concerto in so many layers that one has to ask how it is ever possible to know what is important and how to focus on it.

What Olly did in these rehearsals was, instead of pulling the piece apart and building it from the details up, he played it through a lot, asking every now and then one group to play alone. He allowed us to hear these beautiful and delicate layers on their own, which were hidden under the mass of the music. It was like seeing not only the forest but also every tree and all the flowers as well. As a result, we can now hear one of the most moving pieces for cello and orchestra ever written. Olly also dug out the texts on which each love song is based on. They bring to light the incredible sensitivity and culture of Henze. Like the texts which cross over centuries and a multitude of styles, the piece goes through every possible situation, from the most delicate to the most violent.

Now that I no longer have the possibility to make music with my dearest and closest friend Olly, I am so happy that it is the recording of this very concerto that we can leave as our joint testament.

Anssi Karttunen

Hans Werner Henze
Heliogabalus Imperator – Works for Orchestra
Anssi Karttunen, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Oliver Knussen
Wergo, WER 73442

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