Through the 1960s Hans Werner Henze’s music became ever more politically engaged. Some of those pieces have not worn well, but one of the exceptions is the “recital for four musicians”, El Cimarrón, which Henze composed in 1969-70, while living in Cuba. With a text by the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, it’s based upon the autobiography of the Cuban Esteban Montejo, who at the age of 104 had told the story of his remarkable life as a runaway slave to the writer Miguel Barnet.
Henze and Enzensberger present this tale as an 80-minute song cycle, in which the part of El Cimarrón (a 19th-century Spanish term for a runaway slave) is taken by a baritone, accompanied by flute, guitar and a vast array of percussion. It follows Montejo from his birth through to the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886 – when in reality conditions on the sugar cane plantations changed very little for the workers – to the arrival of mechanisation and the corruption of church and state that eventually made revolution inevitable.
The texts are sometimes too wordy – for this rare performance they were delivered in an English translation by Christopher Keene – and the dramatic shape of the cycle is not as clear as it might be. But it’s still an engrossing work, full of imaginative colours and textures. Henze’s music is best described as eclectically expressionist; there are instrumental moments that recall Boulez’s Marteau sans Maître, while the baritone’s extended vocal techniques suggest that Henze might well have heard Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (first performed in 1969) before starting his score.
But as this performance demonstrated, El Cimarrón is also a thrilling virtuoso vehicle for outstanding artists, like the remarkable quartet brought together at the Wigmore Hall, led by the baritone Will Liverman, whose portrayal of the central role was a tour de force of technique and stamina. Sean Shibe was the guitarist, and he, like the flautist Adam Walker, was also required to play several percussion instruments to add to the stage-filling battery of exotica assigned to Owen Gunnell – El Cimarrón is sometimes a visual treat as well as a musical one.
