Hans Werner Henze. Royal Winter Music. Two Sonatas on Shakespearean Characters marks an important stage in Stefano Grondona’s recording career: after years of sustained engagement with it and public performances (roughly from 1982 to 1995), the musician returns to confront this pivotal work of twentieth-century guitar repertoire. At the same time, in the manner and outcomes of this traversal, the record bears witness to an oblique and little-trodden modality of approaching compositions that, like this one, embody peculiarities and contradictions of the more cultured guitar repertoire.

A Case Study of Hans Werner Henze’s Royal Winter Music, 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 makes clear that, through the Royal Winter Music cycle, he intended to engage with a series of key characters from Shakespearean theatre (to whom the different movements of the sonatas are dedicated), who appear and disappear through the guitar’s sonic textures.