Soon after the DVD recording of L’Upupa, which Henze has said will be his last stage work (3/05), comes this CD of his two early radio operas. Written immediately after Boulevard Solitude and overlapping with the early stages of work on König Hirsch, they show his awareness of the German expressionist tradition (Erwartung, Wozzeck) and also his rejection of avant-gardism in favour of a more expansive, neo-romantic idiom. Indeed, the use of rococo-style parody in Das Ende einer Welt brings Richard Strauss’s Capriccio briefly to mind.

Ein Landarzt – ‘A Country Doctor’ – sets a sinister tale by Kafka. The unfortunate doctor of the title is centre-stage throughout the 26-minute piece, narrating in a feverish Sprechgesang which sometimes moves into pure speech, more rarely into genuine song. The other characters are kept in the background, adding effectively to the nightmarish atmosphere, and although the text unfolds at a rapid rate, the recording, and Roland Hermann’s virtuoso performance, help to ensure that it’s not difficult to follow from the booklet’s well spaced layout.

Henze was probably wise to keep the focus on Kafka’s text as tight as possible but, as a result, the drama dominates the music and there is little lyric expansion or orchestral scene-setting. In these respects, Das Ende einer Welt – ‘The End of a World’ – is more conventional, more representative of the operatic world within which Henze would operate with such distinction. The text, by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, is a satirical attack on cultural pretentiousness in which the audience at a concert in a palazzo on an artificial island in the Venetian lagoon are so hypnotised by the self-regarding formality of the occasion that they fail to react as the island begins to sink and their world of false values and shallow celebration of the facile comes to a sudden end.

Subtle it’s not, and it wouldn’t be difficult to argue that satire works best when its targets are less obvious, less sketchily characterised than is the case here. Nevertheless, Henze’s musical treatment has wit and economy. These recordings date from 1996 and use revisions of the originals which remove all the most obvious radiophonic effects. If anything, the recordings move too far from the kind of atmospheric ambience that would have benefited Ein Landarzt in particular, but the performances are robust, and the booklet contains a useful background essay.