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.

The physiognomy of this work, as Marek Orszulik argued (Aspects of the Historical Development of

Repertoire for the Guitar. 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.