Paul Hindemith
64 products
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Paul Hindemith: Cardillac
$29.99CDCapriccio
Apr 17, 2026C5530 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1; Hindemith: Violin Conce
$20.99CDFuga Libera
Dec 12, 2025FUG859 -
-
-
Hindemith: Der Schwanendreher
$14.99CDBrilliant Classics
Nov 21, 2025BRI96975 -
-
-
-
-
-
Hindemith: Das Marienleben / Harnisch, Schulze
Using the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hindemith first completed Das Marienleben (The Life of Mary) in 1923 and it occupies a key position in his output, marking a transition from avant garde Expressionism to his mature neo-classical style. He regarded the cycle as "the best thing I have yet written", an affection retained through painstaking revisions over subsequent years. Hindemith responded to Rilke's imagery with truly moving music that ranges from tenderness and hushed emotion to sweeping dramatic power, the 1948 version transforming his youthful songs into "an organic masterpiece ranking with the great song-cycles".
Hindemith: Music for Cello
Amar-Hindemith Quartet: Complete Recordings 1925-28
"The performances on these discs have one thing in common: they are almost shockingly direct, so that one hears the mind of the composer Hindemith working behind every note. Anyone used to the readings of Mozart’s K.428 and Beethoven’s Op. 96 by, say, the Busch or Smetana Quartets may feel a lack of colour and nuance here. ..And yet, if the listener is patient, much will be gained by attending carefully to this no-frills approach." (Tully Potter)
Hindemith: Works for Orchestra / Eschenbach, NDR Symphony
Ondine's successful Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) recordings with the NDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Christoph Eschenbach continue with another release featuring two major symphonic works by the composer: Symphonie ‘Mathis der Maler' and Symphonie in E-flat.
The orchestra's and Christoph Eschenbach's previous Hindemith release together with Midori won a Grammy Award in 2014.
The ‘Mathis der Maler' Symphony is based on an opera that treats the life of the Renaissance painter Mathias Grünewald. Hindemith started to work on the symphony already prior to the completion of the opera. The symphony was premiered with great success by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler on 12 March 1934. This performance was the last premiere of an orchestral work by Hindemith in Germany before the National Socialist regime issued a general performance prohibition applying to his works in 1936.
Hindemith wrote his Symphonie in E-flat during his exile in the United States in 1940. The Symphony is absolute music in the tradition of the four-movement symphony of Beethoven and the romantic period.
REVIEW:
Eschenbach’s trademark fondness for textural warmth and clarity is much to the fore in Mathis, where strings and woodwind are admirably numinous, the complex counterpoint in both the ‘Engelkonzert’ and the ‘Temptation’ beautifully detailed. The central ‘Grablegung’ is slow, rich-sounding and very introverted. The state-of-the-art recording, pristine and wide-ranging but with no sense of dynamic exaggeration, helps him at the big climaxes, which are imposing, at times even monumental, and there’s a beguiling elegance to the instrumental solos that thread their way through the textures. Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic on DG have more dramatic bite but this is superbly done nevertheless.
Eschenbach’s approach to the underrated Symphony in E flat, meanwhile, is epic, thoughtful and at times startlingly measured. He is wonderfully attuned to the complex trajectory of a work that looks back from a newly acquired place of safety on an old world irrevocably damaged. The opening Sehr lebhaft has terrific élan, the scherzo a supple, gracious wit. The orchestral clarity is again breathtaking. But placed beside the almost reckless energy of Bernstein (Sony—nla) or Hindemith himself (DG), you notice a grander manner and slower speeds. Eschenbach’s longbreathed way with the crucial Sehr langsam steers it closer to ritual mourning than private grief, though his treatment of the work’s closing pages, in which sadness briefly threatens to intrude upon gathering joy, is moving in the extreme.
-- Gramophone
Hindemith: Mathis der Maler / de Billy, Vienna Symphony Orchestra
Mathis der Maler is the central composition of Paul Hindemith’s output for music theater. The reception began with its successful premiere of a symphony of three orchestral parts from the opera, in March of 1934 in Berlin. That was still before the composer was attacked in the National-Socialist press which prompted a defense of Furtwängler’s in a newspaper article titled “The Hindemith Case”. The opera wasn’t premiered until May 1938, in Zurich, where the Hindemith’s had emigrated to, before moving on to the United States. Much as Mathis, who found his political engagement in the Peasant’s War and his calling to paint solely for the glory of God to collide with the expectation to positions himself on religious matters during the Reformation, Hindemith found himself torn between his refusal to propagate for the Nazis, his urge to follow his inner voice, and the demand that he position himself against the regime. These highly acclaimed performances from 2012 at Theater an der Wien with Opera Star Roland Koch in the title role is finally now available as an album release.
REVIEW:
Hindemith wrote his own libretto for Mathis, an exploration of the clash between artists’ responsibility to their art and to the social and political issues of their time. The production is full of telling detail, with the climactic fourth scene depicting the Peasants’ Revolt itself, and Mathis’s vision in the sixth especially vivid. All the protagonists are portrayed with touching truthfulness too. Wolfgang Koch is the conflicted, all-too-human painter, Kurt Streit the cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg, Franz Grundheber the Protestant Riedlinger and Manuela Uhl his daughter Ursula, with whom Mathis is in love. It’s superbly conducted by Bertrand de Billy, making the most of the opera’s visionary moments, and doing his best with its occasional longueurs.
– Guardian (UK)
Hindemith: Complete Piano Concertos / Idil Biret
HINDEMITH Konzertmusik for Piano, Brass, and Two Harps, op. 49. The Four Temperaments. Piano Music with Orchestra (for Piano Left Hand), op. 29. Kammermusik No. 2 for Piano, Quartet, and Brass, op. 36/1. Piano Concerto • Idil Biret (pn); Toshiyuki Shimada, cond; Yale SO • NAXOS 8.573201-02 (2 CDs: 136:15)
Idil Biret will be no stranger to readers; as one of Naxos’s most reliable house artists, she has recorded vast amounts of the piano repertoire for the label. The works on this two-CD set, however, may not be as familiar as she is. With the exception of The Four Temperaments , which has gained somewhat of a foothold on record and as a concert work—Hindemith was originally commissioned by George Balanchine in 1940 to produce a score for a ballet—the other four works on these discs may be new to all but those who are Hindemith devotees.
The title of the album, The Complete Piano Concertos , stretches the definition a bit of what constitutes a concerto, but Hindemith’s habit of writing for unusual combinations of instruments and setting them in somewhat unorthodox forms can make classifying his works subject to interpretation.
The program opens with the Konzertmusik for Piano, Brass, and Two Harps, commissioned by Elizabeth Coolidge Sprague and composed in 1930. The brass instruments called for in the “Brass” of the work’s title are four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, and tuba. In four movements, the piece is best described as being in Hindemith’s neobaroque style.
The Theme with Four Variations for Piano and Strings, commonly referred to as just The Four Temperaments , though originally intended to be choreographed for a ballet, works well as a concert piece because essentially it can be seen as a four-movement symphony with an introduction. The introduction in this case is the statement of the theme. Four variations (movements) follow, each representing one of the four temperaments or medieval humors—black bile for the melancholic, blood for the sanguine, phlegm for the phlegmatic, and yellow bile for the choleric. The bodily fluids are enough to conjure a scene from the embalming room in a mortuary, but Hindemith’s music is full of life and gorgeous sonorities.
As mentioned above, this is the main work in which Biret and the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s strings run into some significant competition in the numbers game. Two versions that have been long on my shelf are those by Carol Rosenberger with the strings of the Royal Philharmonic on Delos and Howard Shelley with the strings of BBC Philharmonic on Chandos. Biret on the present recording acquits herself well in the solo piano part, but the string players of the Yale orchestra, an ensemble made up of the university’s undergraduate students don’t play with quite the coordination and richness of tone as do their professional counterparts across the Pond.
Hindemith, like Ravel, was commissioned to write a piano work for the left hand by Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Quite a few other composers were enlisted in the enterprise as well, including Britten, Kornold, Prokofiev, and Richard Strauss. They all complied, but Wittgenstein ended up not performing all the works he solicited. Hindemith’s contribution was Piano Music with Orchestra (for Piano Left Hand) composed in 1923. It has gained nowhere near the exposure of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand; in fact, at the moment ArkivMusic lists only one other recording besides this one, a 2008 live performance by Leon Fleisher with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra led by Christoph Eschenbach.
The Hindemith is a captivating score with a perky, jazzy first movement; a catchy, ostinato-driven second movement that periodically lapses into march-like, military fanfares; a haunting third movement in which the piano and a solo English horn (then later a solo flute) engage in a long, slow, lonely dance; and a Finale that once again is in the composer’s best neobaroque style.
The Kammermusik No. 2, for Piano, Quartet, and Brass, is the second in a series of seven Kammermusik works Hindemith promised to deliver to conductor Hermann Scherchen, who took an interest in promoting new music by contemporary composers of the period. It’s a bit difficult to categorize these works, for no two of them are scored for the same combination of instruments, but all of them feature a solo instrument and a varied ensemble of 11 or more players. Because the solo instrument—whether piano, cello, violin, viola, viola d’amore, or organ—is treated as it would be in a concerto, the seven works are loosely classified as chamber concertos, but the number of instruments in the orchestra pushes the definition of “chamber.” To confuse matters further, sandwiched in between the first and third of these seven Kammermusik scores, is a lone stray, if you will, that goes by the title, Kleine Kammermusik , so-called because it is scored for wind quintet with no soloist; yet it’s sometimes lumped together with its larger-scaled Kammermusik cousins.
All together then there are eight of these works, but the only recorded version I’m aware of that includes the whole shebang—and it’s an outstanding one—is the two-disc set by Riccardo Chailly leading members of the Royal Concertgebouw on Decca. If one or more readers are wondering why I’m omitting the equally excellent set by Claudio Abbado with members of the Berlin Philharmonic on EMI, it’s because that set, as well as all the others listed, include only the seven Kammermusik entries. Abbado fills out his set leading violist Tabea Zimmermann in an incomparably beautiful performance of Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher . But Chailly’s set, as far as I know, is unique in being the only one to include the lone Kleine Kammermusik score for wind quintet.
Perhaps it’s the other surveys that make more sense, because the Kleine Kammermusik is really a fish out of water that doesn’t go with the seven Kammermusik works. Still, it’s too delightful a piece to be without, and stand-alone recordings of it are mostly included on programs of wind quintet works by a mix of composers, though one, on Sony, does offer an all-Hindemith program of the composer’s other wind works.
Most of the Kammermusik scores fall into Hindemith’s neobaroque style, for which reason they have sometimes been branded the “ Brandenburg s of the 20th century.” I wouldn’t push that analogy too far, though, for it may be apt to the extent that the writing is contrapuntal in nature and that each concerto is scored for a different combination of instruments, but in harmonic, rhythmic, and textural makeup the music is very Modernistic. This is not the type of neobaroque treatment one hears in a work like Stravinsky’s Pulcinella , which really is based on late Baroque and very early Classical models.
Finally, we come to Hindemith’s formally titled Piano Concerto of 1945, premiered by George Szell, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the pianist for whom the piece was written, Jesús Maria Sanromá. Hindemith composed the Concerto while vacationing in Maine and Connecticut. Of the five works on the disc, this is the latest written and, frankly, if you’re not already familiar with the piece, it’s the one that’s likely to take three or four hearings before you warm to it. It’s not that its musical language is any more Modernistic or difficult to comprehend than what has gone before; rather, it’s that the work seems to proceed episodically, with sections following each other that don’t seem, on the surface at least, to relate. Thus, the logic of the score is elusive.
Current competition is slim, and what there is of it is mostly not very current, with a 1948 performance led by Sergiu Celibidache and a First Edition recording by the Louisville Orchestra led by Lawrence Leighton Smith. The most recent version—aside from the one at hand—is by Werner Andreas Albert leading the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra on CPO, and even that one dates back more than a decade.
For Hindemith fans, this new Naxos collection of the composer’s complete works featuring a solo piano in combination with various instrumental ensembles will make an excellent addition to your collection, even if you already have some of these works on other recordings. For Hindemith novices and the curious, at Naxos’s bargain prices, this new two-disc set offers much very attractive and enjoyable music in excellent performances, and it may just inspire you to explore more of Hindemith’s output. Recommended.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
Hindemith: Nusch-Nuschi-Tänze - Sancta Susana - Mathis der Maler
Paul Hindemith’s life was dominated by the events of the two world wars. In 1917, his discovery of contemporary Expressionist poetry and drama transformed him from a talented student to Germany’s leading new composer. His one-act operas Sancta Susanna and Das Nusch-Nuschi date from this period. Sancta Susanna – Hindemith’s first masterpiece – combines religious and erotic symbolism into an eerie narrative that was shocking for its time, whereas the dance suite from Das Nusch-Nuschi emphasises the plot’s origin as a Burmese comedy. The three symphonic movements from the opera Mathis der Maler refer to the three panels of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, but also graphically reflect Hindemith’s own artistic struggles in Nazi Germany.
Hindemith: Sonatas for Viola
Hindemith, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky & Villa-Lobos: Transformation / Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn
"Transformation" is the debut album of Austrian cellist Jeremias Fliedl, laureate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition who is at the beginning of an international career. On this album, he presents works such as Tchaikovsky's famous Rococo Variations and Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 in a version for 9 cellos, with all parts recorded and produced by him. Jeremias Fliedl plays the famous "ex-Gendron" Stradivarius from 1693.
Hindemith: Complete Music for Cello & Piano / Aleandri, Farinelli
Within the extensive repertoire of the German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), music for cello and piano occupies a considerable position in terms of both quantity and quality. Hindemith was primarily a violist and conductor, but his wide-ranging interests led him to experiment with a great variety of instruments both as a composer and a player, making him a de facto multi-instrumentalist. Among his favorite instruments, the cello always occupied a special place in his activities, partly due to his collaboration with his brother Rudolf, an excellent cellist.
His original compositions for the specific duo of cello and piano are varied and numerous, offering a synthetic vision of the different stylistic instances of an author who never tired of rethinking and redefining his language. This recording brings together and offers the listener this entire wonderful portion of Hindemith’s catalogue.
The Drei Stücke Op. 8 (1917) are undoubtedly among the most important pieces of the composer’s youthful phase. The later Sonata Op. 11 No. 3, a composition of considerable constructive commitment and complex genesis, is recorded here for the first time in both versions: one from 1919 (lost piano parts reconstructed by Fazil Say), the other from 1921. The delicate and expressive Drei leichte Stücke ‘Cello in first position’, composed in April 1938, are intended for the didactic sphere, without renouncing the peculiarities of the harmonic language of the composer. The same can be said of the brief and melancholic Meditation, a transcription of a movement from Hindemith’s orchestral ballet Nobilissima Visione. More complex is A Frog he went a-courting. Despite its brevity, it is one of the finest pieces on this program. A dozen concise variations, framed by the initial exposition and the concluding return of the traditional English theme, present a wealth of instrumental, timbral, expressive, and dynamic solutions in a small, dense, brilliant display of Hindemith’s compositional mastery. Do not be deceived by the title Kleine Sonate (1942), which is small in size but not in terms of compositional complexity. The imposing Cello Sonata (1948) was written for Gregor Piatigorsky and premiered by him in New York in the year it was composed. Comparing this Sonata to the Sonata Op. 11 No. 3 conveys a sense of the stylistic evolution across some 30 years.
Paul Hindemith: Cardillac
Hindemith, Nielsen, Pärt & Tomasi: Elements / Belfiato Quintet
Hindemith, Kirsch, Koechlin & Perrino: Maria Lindo - English Horn Recital
Charles Koechlin had a very personal style and was inspired by a wide variety of motifs, as nature, the mysterious Orient, French folk songs ... Sometimes, he came close to musical Impressionism, as in Au Loin. Hindemith’s composed the Sonata for the english horn in 1941, by which time he had moved to the United States, where he was teaching at Yale University. The Sonata for cor anglais and piano of Dirk Michael Kirsch is a very intimate homage to the composer’s homeland (Westerland/Sylt, Germany), in which he musically evokes colourful images of landscapes and souls. The work of Ander Perrino combines several ideas that I wanted to try out and that has a very strong connection to popular music. Following the initial idea, each movement is independent as if it were a story, hence the name of Five short stories. Maria Lindo collaborated with symphony and opera orchestras such as the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Budapest Festival Orchestra. María is the artistic director of the company Linien Soundkraft, which realises projects fusing music with other art forms.
Hindemith: Complete Music for Piano Duo / Nocchi, Farinelli
This record contains the complete works for piano duo (piano 4-hands and 2 pianos) by Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). While Hindemith was foremost a violist, not a pianist, he knew his way around the piano, and this familiarity is reflected in his compositions for the instrument, all of a decent technical level and featuring great originality of expression. Even if he doesn’t immediately spring to pianists’ minds, he deserves to be included in the small group of innovators who significantly enhanced the piano repertoire in the early 20th century, in particular with his Suite 1922, three solo piano sonatas and Ludus Tonalis. Hindemith’s compositions for piano duo, while few in number, are significant and spread across the span of his career, providing snapshots of his various compositional phases. While the Walzer of 1916 are an output of Hindemith’s early training in composition, by 1921 his Ragtime already reflects an early-mature period during which he sought to define a personal style of his own that could be openly abrasive and irreverent. The final three works, on the other hand, present a fully mature composer with a gift for balanced construction.
Joseph Keilberth conducts the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra
Joseph Keilberth (1908-68) was, according to Brigitte Fassbaender, "the most aesthetic, most natural, most serene of all conductors". Martha Mödl "always found him the greatest", for Hermann Prey "he was and is the trend-setting musician of my singing life" and for Inge Borck simply "the singer’s conductor". He was an exemplary incarnation of the ideal virtues of the German Kapellmeister and died far too early at the conductor's podium during a 'Tristan' performance. His recordings of works by Reger, Pfitzner and Hindemith are legendary for the transparent and vital realization of their complex structures.
Among the archival treasures of the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra (now the WDR Symphony Orchestra), unsurpassed recordings of complex 20th-century masterpieces (1923-62) have been selected for this double album, decisively enriching the orchestral repertoire. Album 1 features the Concerto grosso for double orchestra and piano, the singular pioneering work by Heinrich Kaminski, the mystical master of the new polyphony, as well as Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling's Partita, which timelessly transforms the Bachian tradition. On album 2, two recording premieres by Karl Höller (1907-87) are followed by late Hindemith, Keilberth's favourite composer: Agnes Giebel sings the 6 songs from 'Ein Marienleben', and Anton Heiller, the soloist of the premiere performance under Hindemith, plays in the late organ concerto.
Hindemith: Die Vier Temperamente; Semini: Mosaici di Piazza
Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1; Hindemith: Violin Conce
Hindemith: Cardillac / Soltész, Munich Radio Orchestra
BR-KLASSIK presents the live recording of a concert performance of Hindemith's opera "Cardillac" from the Prinzregententheater in Munich on October 13, 2013, in memory of the great conductor Stefan Soltész. Soltész died unexpectedly on July 22, 2022 - exactly one year ago - after collapsing while conducting Richard Strauss' "Die schweigsame Frau" at the Munich National Theatre. The Hungarian-born Austrian conductor was General Music Director of the Essen Philharmonic and Artistic Director of the Essen Aalto Music Theatre from 1997 to 2013. Both institutions were decisively shaped by him and received several awards during his era. He was a welcome guest conductor with the orchestras in Munich. In addition to the standard works from Mozart to Strauss, an important focus of his opera repertoire was Classical modernism.
Paul Hindemith's three-act opera "Cardillac", composed in 1925/26, was the composer's long-awaited first full-length stage work, and was based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella "Das Fräulein von Scuderi". Hindemith’s librettist Ferdinand Lion created a large-scale opera that focused primarily on the goldsmith Cardillac and on the madness that leads him to murder. Any logically structured plot was replaced by individual, self-contained scenes, resembling isolated snapshots. The premiere took place on November 9, 1926 at the Dresden State Opera under the baton of Fritz Busch, who thus spectacularly continued his series of important world premieres. Although the opera's radical style was perceived as highly unusual, it was nevertheless well received. After 1933, the work disappeared from German-language repertoires, but it promptly returned in 1946. Hindemith undertook a fundamental revision, and it was premiered in Zurich in 1952 - combined with a performance ban on the first version. As early as 1960, however, the release of the 1926 version was achieved – and it went on to supplant its revised version almost completely. This recording also features the original, first version of the opera.
Hindemith: Der Schwanendreher
Lars Vogt - The Complete Warner Classics Edition
Lars Vogt (1970-2022) early recordings collected here provide a document of an artist who always remained authentic, both to himself and to music. Lars Vogt never sought absolute truth, but truthfulness instead meant all the more to him. The man and the artist were always very close, never currying favour and never detached from the world. He was, instead, open and natural. "It's incredibly gratifying when you notice that you can perhaps light a little spark, a little flame for music in people, and when music helps you to find the path to your own soul."
Wolfgang Sawallisch: Complete Symphonic, Lieder & Choral Recordings - Warner Classics Edition, Vol. 1
Music for Viola
Hindemith, P.: Marienleben (Das) (Original Version, 1923)
