Violinist Alexandra Tirsu presents her debut album comprising concertos by Dmitri Shostakovich and Paul Hindemith. Shostakovich's music has resonated with her since childhood, it's atmosphere reflecting the war stories she grew up with. Violin Concerto No. 1 unfolds like a psychological journey-from a shadowy opening to a fierce scherzo, an emotionally charged passacaglia, and a wildly ironic finale. Hindemith's rarely performed Violin Concerto, which Alexandra first explored at the ARD Competition in Munich, reveals a different voice: clear, structured, and quietly expressive. Recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Vasily Petrenko, this album captures a moment of depth, identity, and emotional connection through two powerful 20th-century works.

Paul Hindemith's Der Schwanendreher (literally 'the swan turner') is a viola concerto based on medieval German folk songs. While the 'swan turner' was literally someone who turned the spit of a roasting swan, metaphorically it referred to an itinerant minstrel whose street organ or hurdy-gurdy was cranked via a swan's-neck handle. He composed the work between September and October 1935, and it was premiered at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, with the composer (a virtuoso violist who did much to elevate the instrument's status) serving as soloist. In it, Hindemith creates a musical 'structure' that enhances the solo viola by contrasting it with a uniquely scored tutti ensemble of winds with four cellos and three double basses. After the slow introduction to the first movement comes a section in classic sonata form with orchestration evoking the world and art of minstrelsy. The second movement opens with a sad dialogue between the viola and harp, inspired by an ancient song on lost love; this is followed by a contrasting fugato in which the sadness of the cuckoo (an omen of doom) is alleviated by the musical writing. The third movement features seven variations on the titular 'Schwanendreher' song, whose jovial, light character is skilfully rendered with iridescent rhythmic articulation. A prolific and versatile composer, Hindemith was initially drawn to expressionism and atonal harmony before embracing a neo-Baroque style along his journey towards abstract objectivism. By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, Hindemith had become one of the leading exponents of Gebrauchsmusik ('Utility Music'), a musical approach designed to respond to societal needs as opposed to individual abstract aesthetic feelings. It saw the creation of much music aimed at amateurs, though with no compromise on quality. It was in this context that Hindemith composed the set of Schulwerk fur Instrumental-Zusammenspiel (Educational Music for Instrumental Ensembles) between March and April 1927. Designed for a youth orchestra, the music is by no means uninteresting or technically simple. It's fourth section is made up of the Funf Stucke (Five Pieces) scored for a five-part string orchestra with an additional solo violin introduced in the fifth piece. While the writing remains within certain technical bounds, the score is brimming with expressive variety, rhythmic dynamism, harmonic freedom and timbral sensitivity, all of which can be recognized as hallmarks of this period in Hindemith's compositional career. They showcase the composer's contrapuntal expertise, a quality particularly pronounced in the third piece, Lebhaft, with it's direct connection to Johann Sebastian Bach. In these 'teaching works' Hindemith's meticulous attention to detail reveals a distinctly German penchant for musical craftsmanship meeting the expectations of even 'professional' musicians. - Recorded March 2023, Sala Bianca, Foggia, Italy - Bilingual booklet in English and Italian contains liner notes by Alberto Mammarella - Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) was one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century Germany. His eclectic style incorporates diverse influences such as expressionism, neo-classicism and even jazz. His music is energetic, rhythmically vibrant, witty and joyous, but also able to express deeper and tragic feelings. - Der Schwanendreher is a viola concerto composed by Paul Hindemith in 1935. The title translates to "The Swan Turner, " referring to a medieval kitchen servant who turned roasting spits. The piece is based on old German folk songs, giving it a unique blend of the modern and traditional. Hindemith, himself a violist, premiered it with the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, conducted by Willem Mengelberg. The work is admired for it's inventive orchestration, lyrical themes, and balance between historical charm and contemporary technique. - Performed by Luca Ranieri and the orchestra Ico Suoni Del Sud, conducted by Mario Moresco. Luca Ranieri successfully recorded the Suites for viola solo by Hindemith for Brilliant Classics.

"Sand, see Sugar. Sugar, see Grocer. Grocer, see Hindemith." Such run Tovey's whimsical indexentries in Essays in Musical Analysis (London: 1935/9), inspired by Hindemith's Kammermusik No. 1 and its instrumental exotica. "I like Hindemith and ... he does not bore me" was his judgement, in contrast to Constant Lambert who, in Music Ho! (London: 1934), vented his spleen on the German composer at great and repeated length, calling him "everything in fact but an artist" and "the journalist of modern music", finding his "view of music ... almost excretory". Of his concertos — primarily the early Kammermusik ones of the mid 1920s — Lambert felt that they had "the family resemblance of shape and texture that one edition of a newspaper bears to another". Well, unsurprisingly for a set of works written in the short spell of five years, there are commonalities of style and form, but these are more than made up for by the sheer exuberance of the music, which is what Tovey appreciated.

Whatever your view of the Kammermusiken, the yardstick for recordings of them was defined by Riccardo Chailly and the Concertgebouw in their 1993 Gramophone Award-winning release. This new RCA set is the first challenger but, fine as it is, it cannot dislodge the Decca version. There is not much to choose between the performances and interpretations: Stenz is generally quicker in the early concertos, Chailly in the later ones; the Ensemble Modern produce a rather more hardedged sound than the Concertgebouw, abetted by the RCA recording, though I am not convinced it is quite what Hindemith had in mind, at least for the later instalments in the series (though I doubt if he would have minded overmuch). More importantly, inequalities of balance on the RCA set arise, particularly affecting the stringed instruments, both the soloists in Nos. 3-6 and the quintet in No. I. The Ensemble Modern's accordion in the last-named is barely audible compared to that in the Dutch orchestra, whose siren, incidentally, is in better health (I cannot vouch for the canister of sand). Chailly has the clear edge then in Nos. 1 and 4-6 (for violin, viola and viola d'amore, respectively). In No. 2 (for piano), Stenz and Wiget just shade the decision, but No. 3 (for cello) is a dead heat. I also prefer the RCA version of No. 7, the organ concerto, which was recorded at Hindemith's old music school, the Hoch Conservatoire in Frankfurt: its instrument produces a cleaner, crisper sound. Decca have the advantage secured still further by their inclusion of No. l's companion piece, the Kleine Kammermusik for wind quintet, which RCA parsimoniously omit. If you already have that work, though, and like a brittle tang to your Hindemith, then the Ensemble Modern and Stenz will not disappoint.

-- Gramophone [1/1996]

HINDEMITH Der Schwanendreher. Trauermusik. Kammermusik No. 5 for Solo Viola and Large Chamber Orchestra. Concert Music for Solo Viola and Large Chamber Orchestra (early version) • Tabea Zimmermann (va); Hans Graf, cond; Deutsches SO Berlin • MYRIOS 010 (SACD: 79:59)


As all Hindemithians know, the viola was the composer’s very own instrument of choice, even though he learned to play all the others in the modern orchestra. And during the 1920s and 1930s he often appeared as either soloist and/or conductor, performing the three large-scale concertante works he wrote for his favorite instrument, as well as his various sonatas for it. This brilliant young woman musician, Tabea Zimmermann, has been recording all of this music for the first-class new German label, Myrios Classics. The major discographical interest of this release comes in the form of a premiere recording of Hindemith’s original six-movement version of the 1939 Concert Music , reconstructed from manuscripts and performance editions which the composer had apparently revised and rejected in the interest of making the piece both shorter and practicable.


Here, for the first time, we get a chance to hear two movements of the initial six—a relatively brief but lovely slow fourth movement containing a ravishing oboe solo theme, and an altogether different Finale that is more substantial and distinctive than the shorter and rather throwaway movement heard in all previous recordings. However, in the revised version it is interesting to notice how every movement is permeated by the insistently busy, bustling, motto-theme heard at the very opening of the score, while this initial attempt has more thematic diversity and less of an organic integration. Perhaps Hindemith could have made the suite-like Concert Music even longer by inserting the variations somewhere between earlier movements, since it seems he remained forever undecided about the over-all form of the work, having originally conceived of it as consisting of two separate sections of either two or three movements each. In any case, this is a recording of a work poised on the cusp of the composer’s gradual evolution from the precedent-shattering, nose-thumbing defiance of the 1920s Kammermusik set—whose prickly concerto grosso incarnation for viola is superbly realized here—to the somewhat mellower, more magisterial yet genially neo-Baroque manner of his later years.


This program opens with perhaps one of the most perceptively precise and idiomatic recording of Hindemith’s popular Schwanendreher Concerto, in which the composer discovered and exploited the down-to-earth idiom of the German medieval folk universe. One would have to go back to the old Primrose recording to find an equal to this rendition.


Also included here is the ethereal Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra, composed at the last minute in memory of King George V—a work which Hindemith is quoted in the booklet as describing as a “minor effort”—hardly an accurate evaluation, to say the least. The booklet also offers a number of deliciously evocative photos of Hindemith and the dedicatees of the Schwanendreher , Darius and Madeleine Milhaud, as well as other illustrious musicians of the era.


Conductor Hans Graf and his musicians have these scores in their bloodstreams and, as for Ms. Zimmermann and the Myrios engineering team, words of praise fail me. In short, this CD belongs on everybody’s shelf.


FANFARE: Paul A. Snook

In Mosaici di Piazza Armerina, Semini takes up the cloistered music by Respighi with Vetrate di chiesa. The evocation of the figures in coloured pieces is translated into a use of continuously overlapping motifs, which creates a rotating, cyclical effect and alludes to the eternity of art, perpetually capable of dying only to rise again. On his side, Hindemith created 'music of use': art from workshop and craft, bound to live beyond the romantic myth of transcendental inspiration.

The album contains recordings of three sonatas by Paul Hindemith, who began his compositional career under the influ ence of Claude Debussy - who was still active back then - and ended it in a com pletely different reality of the 1960s, in the era of sonoristic, formal and har monic experiments. He was also an excel lent violist, hence a significant number of his works dedicated to viola. The first sonata is still of a romantic nature; it cap tivates us with it's beauty and richness of motifs, whereas the other two are much more contemporary in terms of sound. All of them are demanding, both technically and structurally. Maria Shetty, a violist associated with the Cracow Academy of Music and the NOSPR, chamber musician, co-founder of the Messages Quartet, and pianist Monika Wilinska-Tarcholik form a perfect duo. They guide the listener through complex, meaningful musical matter with virtuoso flair and with great sensitivity to tone colour and stylistic details.

Recorded for the first time on one album, this release features Hindemith’s complete works for violin and piano and the rarely recorded Kleine Sonata for Viola D’amore and piano. Hindemith’s reputation as a master composer, viola virtuoso and dominant pedagogue- who, being able to play practically every standard instrument (and a few non-standard ones), expected the same from his students- has tended to obscure the fact that he first came to attention not as a composer or violist but as a violinist. Roman Mints has had a lifelong love of the works of Paul Hindemith, which began when he was a young violinist, studying in Moscow in the 1980s. He says “This music, written not just before I was born but closer to the time of my grandparents’ birth, felt completely contemporary, and daringly advanced in its sound- and not just to me, as it turns out: 30 years on, Hindemith is still regarded by concert programmers as too difficult for the wider public. I put Sonata in D on the stand. I was gripped by the first subject, constructed from seconds and sevenths, marked to be played ‘with stony defiance.’ I was never the same again and he became my window into contemporary music.”

PAUL HINDEMITH FRANK P. ZIMMERMANN, VIOLIN;*FRANKFURT RADIO SYM. ORCH./P.JARVIENRICO PACE, PIANO ** CTO. FOR VIOLIN & ORCH.(1939*)SONATA FOR SOLO VLN, OP.31 NO.2,"ES IST SO SCHONES WETTER DRAUBEN';SONATA IN E FLAT FOR VIOLIN& PIANO, OP.11 NO.1; SONATA IN E FOR VIOLIN & PNO. (1935)SONATA IN C FOR VIOLIN & PN. (1939)**

The first new opera production under the baton of Simone Young, director of the Hamburg State Opera and GMD of the Philharmonic State Orchestra, was a triumph. Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler requires a large opera house to use all of its resources; this is why it is very seldom staged.

This significant Hindemith opera is a rarity in CD catalogs as well – in contrast to the many available recordings of the “Mathis” symphony. OehmsClassics now releases a new complete recording, a live recording of the highly celebrated Hamburg premiere from September 25, 2005 with Falk Struckmann as Mathis.

REVIEWS:

Seventy years after its premiere, Mathis der Maler finally emerges here as one of the great operas of the 20th century. Wholeheartedly recommended to all!

Mathis is Matthias Grünewald, one of several names used by the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, but the opera is only incidentally about his painting. Rather it is about the artist’s place in, and conflicts with, a troubled society, subject matter that made it anathema to Nazi Germany (it was eventually premiered in Zurich in 1938). Mathis, at first content with his life as a painter, is drawn into the bloody Peasants’ War (1524–1526) between the common people and the nobility, for which Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church was also a driving force. After witnessing the horrific effects of war and gross inhumanity on both sides, the old painter withdraws completely from the world (seldom has such a vast, complex plot been so over-simplified). Other major figures are Hans Schwalb, the leader of the rebels, Albrecht von Brandenburg, a surprisingly freethinking Cardinal who employs Mathis, and Ursula, who loves him. This potentially tendentious opera is rescued by its wonderful music, Hindemith at his absolute peak. The climactic scene is a vocal/choral version of The Temptation of St. Anthony , the finale of the Symphony “Mathis der Maler,” and almost everything in the opera rises to a similar level.

...the Oehms [recording] boils along, teeming with life...the Hamburg Philharmonic is magnificent, realizing all of the music in a way that the Bavarians never did. The music and the drama are so powerful, so engrossing, that this listener was unaware of time passing. Getting up to change to CD 3, I thought, “Didn’t I just begin CD 2?” But the booklet insists that 67 minutes had passed. Kudos to Simone Young, general manager of the Hamburg State Opera and music director of the Hamburg Philharmonic!

The Oehms recording is worthy of this performance; everything is heard clearly, even in multi-voiced tutti passages. Producer Dirk Lüdemann and sound engineer Dominik Blech deserve star billing as well.

-- Fanfare

Classical Music

Music for Viola

Complete Works For Solo Viola

Classical Music

Classical Music

HINDEMITH Tuttifänchen • Johannes Zurl, cond; Herman Wallén (Meister Tuttifant puppet maker); Nora Lentner (Trudel his daughter); Bele Kumberger (Tuttifänchen his puppet); Sebastian Bluth (Punoni director of the puppet theater); Annika Schlicht (Mutter Berthe); various actors; Berlin R Children’s Ch; Deutsches SO Berlin • CPO 777 802-2 (72:20 Text and Translation)


Tuttifänchen is a children’s Christmas play with music, originally inspired by a tale for and about a puppet theater. Hindemith wrote the music in 1922, shortly after he had come to public attention with his three avant-garde operas ( Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen; Das Nusch-Nuschi; Sancta Susanna ) and his op. 16 String Quartet. The tale—a distant cousin of Pinocchio —concerns a puppet who comes to life and causes everyone a lot of trouble. The music is simple and direct—when the puppets in the story dance a ballet, they do so to a sprightly, elegant foxtrot based on a Gottschalk Cakewalk —with no hint of the avant-garde. The chamber orchestra has single winds; Hindemith’s orchestration is light and nearly as colorful as that of his friend Franz Schreker. The vocal parts “can be sung by good actors,” but they are taken here by professional singers, all of whom are delightful. There is a good deal of conversation, argument, laughing, crying, and screaming (on 19 tracks) during these 72 minutes, connecting 23 tracks of songs, duets, melodramas (by the puppet), intermezzos, marches, a lullaby, and ensembles. It is all in German, which I cannot follow in real time, but the action is lively and the actors—children as well as adults—spirited. A side-by-side German/English libretto gives us only the 23 musical numbers; unfortunately, it also ignores a march (track 29) that includes an aria.


Hindemith’s reputation today is that of a serious composer of serious music; he looks the part in photos, but he was a light-hearted fellow with a lively sense of humor, a cartoonist who drew his own whimsical Christmas cards each year. This charming children’s play is in tune with the inner Hindemith, and its consistent quality reflects his always solid craftsmanship. The work begins to turn serious near the end: A final melodrama, in which the puppet decides to return to the fir tree from whence he came, has some of the most serene music you will ever hear; it could be a Bach chorale drawn through Brahms. The following lullaby is also gorgeous, and the play closes with a rousing Christmas carol, solemn yet joyful. Bits and pieces of this music have appeared before, some in piano reductions, but I believe this is its first complete recording. You don’t need to be either German or a child to enjoy Tuttifänchen . It is a minor masterpiece of its kind, and this production does it full justice.


FANFARE: James H. North