Hans Werner Henze – Works for Solo Violin
Peter Sheppard Skaerved- Violin (Amati 1629)
Unedited Outtakes. 18 7 16 (First Recordings)
St John the Baptist. Aldbury
Engineer-Jonathan Haskell

Sonata ‘Tirsi, Mopso, Aristeo’ (Original Version) 1977 (Link to later version https://www.sheppardskaerved.com/2014/02/17173/)

Tirsi

Mopso

Aristeo

With Hans Werner Henze in 1989

…a big step-recording the original version of the 1977 Henze Solo Sonata. In the 1990s, Henze revised the piece, and I performed and recorded it in the this very version. In 1998, we had a good-natured disagreement about the revision. He told me that I would be able to record his original version … in the future.

With Henze and Jan Philip Schulze. Genoa 1998

Coming back to this piece, in the earlier, longer and more complex version, has forced me to think about how dramatic roles evolve. I have to acknowledge, that, having lived with this piece for the better part of two decades, playing it many times, recording it in 2000, it, and I are not the same as we were. I am surprised to find how much things have changed. Not all of the changes are personal, that is, purely mine, as what and actor or musician ‘does’ with a role is very much conditioned by things they cannot control.

My performing score: Ländler(1977)

What is it to spend a performing lifetime with a piece of music? How much does it change you? What happens when the composer dies? How do we look at notes on the page which are so familiar, that we do not ‘see’ them; they just pass through us? Henze’s Solo Sonata is that for me, and recording it for the second time, many years after my first traversal, brings these questions into the open. All that I know, is that it reveals surprising, wonderful, and frightening things, and that, when great music becomes part of us, it makes us responsible for voices which me must not impede or stifle

PSS in conversation with Hans Werner Henze . Manchester 1998

Ländler (1977)