Hans Werner Henze's new work "Opfergang" (Immolazione), that premiered the other night in Rome, conducted by Antonio Pappano with Orchestra di Santa Cecilia (the singers: Ian Bostridge as The Dog and Sir John Tomlinson as The Wanderer), received an enormous outpouring of applause, and now the reviews in the Italian press hail the work as a triumph.
Corriere della Sera's hard-to-please lead critic today hails HWH as "the greatest living composer" and "the last composer". He writes (review not online until tomorrow) that
"Nowadays, only Henze can create a score of such quality", and that "It's hard to imagine how the octuagenarian composer can still project such force, with such merciless control: composing, for him, must be a form of immolation".
Rome's Il Tempo called Bostridge's singing "astonishing" (and proudly points out that Henze, who has been living in Italy since the 1950s, after the performance said that he feels so completely at home here that he now uses the expression "we Italians").