Royal Winter Music is the name given to two solo works for classical guitar by the German composer Hans Werner Henze.
Ten years later it took a more concrete form, when Julian Bream suggested to me that I should write a substantial new guitar work for him.
It possesses a richness of sound capable of embracing everything one might find in a gigantic contemporary orchestra; but one has to start from silence in order to notice this: one has to pause, and completely exclude noise.
Through masks, voices and gestures, they speak to us of great passion, of tenderness, sadness and comedy: strange events in people's lives.
And not only in order to be able to keep the overall title of the cycle (which is hereby closed) with its clear connection to Richard III, but also because of my attachment to Shakespeare's characters, or at least some of them, whose musical portrait I also want to make the second, completely different sonata, I felt compelled to do.