At the beginning of this month, Quartz Music released a recording of the complete works composed by Paul Hindemith for violin and piano, performed by violinist Roman Mints and pianist Alexander Kobrin. [updated 8/23, 11:35 a.m.: My past interest in Mints’ recordings has focused heavily on his attention to music by Alfred Schnittke; but I think that my first encounter with his performance on CD involved the ECM New Series album String Paths, surveying the music of Dobrinka Tabakova, which I discussed on my Examiner.com site back in June of 2013. Compared with those two composers, Hindemith is significantly less provocative; but Mints himself claims that he was first drawn to that music during his student years in the eighties, which he found “daringly advanced in its sound.”]
To be fair, this new release should probably be described as a “complete++” album. Hindemith composed only four pieces for violin and piano, all sonatas. Two, composed in 1918, were included in his Opus 11 collection. The other two do not have opus numbers: the E major composer in 1935 and the C major, composed in 1939.
The album also includes two selections repurposed for performance by violin and piano. One of these is the “Meditation” scene from the one-act ballet “Nobilissima Visione,” choreographed by Léonide Massine to depict episodes from the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Hindemith extracted it in a version for viola and piano (Hindemith was, himself, an accomplished violist); but, according to the booklet notes by Guy Rickhards, “the music was designed also for performance on the violin.”
The other selection is the 1936 “Trauermusik” (mourning music), written on short notice following the death of King George V of England. This was written as a suite for viola and string orchestra, and Hindemith played it in a live broadcast of Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The version for violin and piano is again Hindemith’s own.
That leaves one “wild card” selection, the second of the sonatas in Hindemith’s Opus 25 collection. This one, called a “Kleine Sonate” (little sonata), was composed for viola d’amore and piano. This instrument, whose popularity peaked during the seventeenth century, was distinguished by having a set of strings that would vibrate sympathetically in response to the pitches sounded on the bowed strings:
The orientation of strings on a viola d’amore (photograph by Aviad2001, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
The instrument had fallen out of fashion by the nineteenth century, but Hindemith was one of a few composers that took a revived interest in it. (Another was film composer Bernard Herrmann.) Because there is so much interest in early music here in San Francisco, I have been fortunate enough to experience the sound of this instrument on a few occasions; and that experience was definitely an eerie one. However, the impact of those sympathetic sonorities does not really register on this recording; and I am not sure whether the problem had to do with recording technology or the fact that Hindemith never gave those sympathetic strings a fair shake (so to speak).
Nevertheless, the “Kleine Sonate” is the only weak card in this album’s deck. Mints’ violin performances consistently find the expressive rhetoric in Hindemith’s scores, and his interactions with Kobrin are always right on the money. If Hindemith fell out of fashion during the second half of the twentieth century, then Mints’ appreciation of the qualities that distinguish Hindemith’s style is definitely welcome. If this album triggers an increased interest in other aspects of the Hindemith catalog, so much the better.
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