As if in slow motion, librettist Thornton Wilder summarizes a series of Christmas dinners celebrated by the Bayard family over a period of ninety years and fuses them into a single long meal. The concentration of the characters and their standardization are all things that Hindemith's setting picks up on: he counterbalanced them musically by means of development, individualization, and variation - thus designing a kind of music that expresses contingency - significant coincidence - as an attitude toward life. The view of what Wilder calls the "mill of time" is thus always a view of the future as well - whether we perceive that as misfortune or consolation or both at once.

Siegfried Mauser, who has already recorded Hindemith's complete works for cello and piano for WERGO with Julius Berger, inaugurates with this CD a complete recording of Hindemith's piano music on five CDs. The booklet reprints an extensive, essential essay by Friederike Becker that provides an introduction to the young Hindemith's aesthetic world and a detailed commentary on the piano works included here. Siegfried Mauser: piano.

The works for piano presented here cover a time period of a good 20 years and document the great variety of Hindemith's oeuvre.

In his early years, Hindemith confides that he adores Christian Morgenstern's poems, "perhaps because he is as crazy as I am, or vice versa." In his "Lustige Sinfonietta" Hindemith refers more to the atmosphere of Morgenstern, and in no case does he trace the single poems literally in music. Grotesque musical results arise from an intended discrepancy between the sovereignly mastered musical devices and the expressive content of the music. "Rag Time (well-tempered)" is the first work in which a stylized piece of "popular" modern dance music was directly related to the music of Bach. Bach was here rediscovered as a composer of "functional" music, and Hindemith was only too aware of this rediscovery: "Do you think Bach is turning in his grave? He wouldn't think of it! If Bach were alive today, perhaps he would invent the shimmy or at least take it over into respectable music. Perhaps he might even also take a theme from the 'Well-tempered Klavier' by a composer who might be to him what Bach is to us." First Recording.

In 1946 Hindemith, who became an American citizen in January of that year, composed the Requiem for Robert Shaw's Collegiate Chorale. Whitman's poem had been written on the death of Lincoln. Some parallel events at Roosevelt's death and the excellent interpretation presented Hindemith's work a great success. The recent identification of the Jewish melody Gaza, which appears in large parts of the work, reveals a further meaning: It must be seen as Hindemith's musical reaction to the Holocaust, a reaction, whose effect is all the more penetrating and persuasive, because Hindemith himself never revealed the identity of the Gaza melody for the purposes of cheap publicity. Hindemith wrote a Requiem for the living (the survivors), who are obligated to remember and identify themselves with the victims and must transform this historical moment into an imperishable personal experience.

Paul Hindemith was motivated to work with Gottfried Benn after he had read his article "Can Writers Change the World?". In it Benn states, in opposition to the political program of salvation of his days: History has no overarching sense, no upward movement, no dawning of humanity, a motif of the Orient, a myth of the Mediterranean Sea; it survives the Niagara Falls, only to drown in the bathtub; necessity calls and randomness answers. Benn then gave form to these views in his poem "Das Unaufh�rliche", which is supposed to express the self-transformation of the creative act. Hindemith was confronted with the paradoxical problem that he could in no way express the principle of the perpetual, to which as an art form music, too, is subject, by means of an emphatically autonomous music. Instead, he sought to embody the principle of the perpetual in his basic compositional decisions. Hindemith succeeds by always giving something fictive to the "organic" closed forms of the "natural" musical flow. The principle of the perpetual is assigned to three themes, which almost all of the work's other themes are derived from in the most subtle, unobtrusive art of transformation. And when the final chorus returns to these three themes in their original form, it makes thematically manifest what was always latently present: the principle of the perpetual.

The CD presents partly unpublished choral works of Paul Hindemith who wrote in 1952: "It is not going too far to say that the art of a cappella ensemble singing and the music written for it can be thought of as the measure of the achievement of the musical culture of any particular period." The brief texts of the canons reveal his love of punning games and an underlying sense of humor.

Hindemith's "Ludus tonalis" which is presented on this CD was composed in the American exile. It is not only the composer's last work for piano solo, but also one of the most important works of piano compositions of the 20th century. To show what music and composition are: This is what Hindmith tried to undertake in his "Ludus tonalis". The basis for harmonic practice and tonal structure presented in "The Craft of Musical Composition" finds direct application in the final concept of the "Ludus tonalis". Heinrich Strobel, musicologist and Hindemith's first biographer called "Ludus tonalis" the "Well-Tempered Piano" of the 20th century. Composer Fritz von Borries said: "What has here become music is not a mathematical problem or experiment, but a deep spiritual triumph, in which ultimate reason and ultimate being are revealed. How can the meaning of Praeludium and Postludium be more clearly represented than by letting that which began in the beginning appear in the end and run it's course in reverse direction and vertically inverted? And what wonderful music it is both times."

In Paul Hindemith's collected works the compositions for violoncello and piano occupy a significant position. They range from solo sonata to concerto with large orchestra. The large number of compositions for cello is perhaps surprising when one recalls that Hindemith first attracted public attention as a violist and that many of his works were written especially for his own concert performances. However Hindemith was always surrounded by cellists - in his private life as well as in the circle of friendly colleagues - who performed his works. Julius Berger: Violoncello / Siegfried Mauser: piano.

Rudolf Hindemith, Vol. 2

Rudolf Hindemith Edition, Vol. 1: Chamber and Piano Works

A recital of the complete Hindemith violin sonatas, performed by violinist Eliot Lawson and pianist Jill Lawson. The violin sonatas reflect Hindemith's compositional development and his stunning ability to absorb, transform and adapt his many and varied influences - tonality, atonality polytonality, jazz, late Romanticism, etc... Booklet contains detailed notes on the music and artist biographies.

Paul Hindemith's compositions for a cappella choir are distinguished by a richness of expression and mood manifested in various compositional techniques and artistic forms. Again and again in his writings and textbooks, Hindemith emphasized the important role of the singing voice as a natural instrument for the composer-in-the-making to test his compositional sketches as well as for the layperson and music lover for spontaneous singing and music making. The CD presents choral compositions on texts by Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, medieval and self-composed texts. Both dramatic and humorous, light tones in these choral works show the breadth of Hindemith's skillfulness. The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award and the "Echo Klassik 2001" (best choral-work recording)!

This release features nearly all of the compositions by Paul Hindemith, performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Philharmonia Orchestra with the composer conducting. The recordings presented here were made between 1955-1956. Since Hindemith could play nearly all the orchestral instruments, had perfect pitch and had the richest possible experience as an orchestral musician, he was an ideal conductor. With his European tours after the Second World War, Hindemith increasingly developed his conducting activities; these took up all his time after 1953 after he had given up his work at Yale University. He had indeed conducted in public for the first time in 1915 and repeatedly guest conducted exclusively his own music in the United States, but after 1947 he also included music of other composers - at first Bach, Haydn and Mozart - on his programmes.

Early works usually provide information about the origin and first manifestations of a composer's musical personality; Hindemith's works for violoncello and piano written in the years 1917 and 1919/20 are no exception. To be sure the earlier pieces document above all the compositional point of departure - the influences of Reger and Strauss on the texture of the piano writing and harmony are obvious - while the later work already exhibits aspects typical of Hindemith's personal style in the 1920s which caused the composer to be viewed as a notorious musical terror. Julius Berger: violoncello / Siegfried Mauser: piano.