Heinz Holliger is not only the greatest oboist of the last half century, but he has also emerged as one of the leading European composers of his generation, even though inthe UK at least his music remains little known, and a number of his major works, including his first opera Schneewittchen, and his superb Violin Concerto, have yet to be performed here. Holliger was 80 last month, and ECM, which has recorded so many of his works, has marked the occasion with Zwiegespräche (dialogues). It’s a collection mostly of miniatures, 33 of them, almost all including oboe, by Holliger and his kindred musical spirit, György Kurtág, that is followed by one of Holliger’s earliest works, the solo-oboe sonata he began in 1956.
Both Holliger and Kurtág studied with the Hungarian Sandor Veress, and have always shared a fondness for spare, aphoristic musical statements, so that these pieces form a stylistically coherent sequence. The centrepiece is Holliger’s Lecture of 2016, where texts by the Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet serve as the starting points for seven short pieces for oboe and cor anglais or two oboes; here Jaccottet’s reading of the relevant poem precedes each of the duets, in which Holliger is partnered by Marie-Lise Schüpbach. The pieces by Kurtág include movements for solo contrabass clarinet and soprano and oboe, as well as the many pieces he has composed for Holliger, including two that he wrote around the time of the death of Holliger’s harpist wife Ursula in 2014, one of them, … für Heinz..., for piano left hand, which Holliger himself plays here.
In every piece the music is pared back to its barest essentials, so that a single pitch or interval acquires huge expressive importance. It all makes a marvellously austere birthday tribute, with Holliger at the centre of things as a performer too; it was recorded last year and his oboe playing has lost none of its authority and peerless musicianship.
Also out this week
Hans Werner Henze was one of many composers that Oliver Knussen championed so eloquently, and a year after Knussen’s death, Wergo has released a collection of Henze’s music that he recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2014. It’s dominated by a fabulously vivid account of the half-hour long “allegoria per musica” Heliogabalus Imperator, a symphonic poem of almost Straussian vividness portraying the violent life and death of the Roman emperor Elagabalus; there’s also the orchestral fantasia Los Caprichos, based upon some of Goya’s famous series of etchings, and, with Anssi Karttunen as the soloist, the cello concerto Englische Liebeslieder, inspired by a selection of poems in English ranging from Shakespeare to Robert Graves.
