Drei Orchesterstücke

‘The story of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s life is the story of personal commitment and a career in the antifascist struggle. It has made him respectable, likeable and exemplary to us, his younger colleagues,’ Hans Werner Henze said in a speech on the occasion of Hartmann’s 75th birthday. Hartmann’s harrowing piano sonata with the epithet ‘27 April 1945’ describes a procession of inmates near Dachau concentration camp shortly before liberation by the US Army. Henze already came to know the work in the year of its composition and drafted an orchestra version right away. However, he could not finish his very free transcription of three movements until half a century later – while working on his Sinfonia N. 9.