Anna Gourari Links Schnittke to Hindemith

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Around the middle of this month, ECM New Series released its first album of pianist Anna Gourari performing with an orchestra. She had previously released three solo albums, so this new release offered a new perspective for those following her work. She performed two twentieth-century compositions with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner. As of this writing, the album is available for MP3 download from an Amazon.com Web page; and the Web page for the CD is taking pre-orders for a release date of August 2.

The album begins with the more recent of these works, Alfred Schnittke’s 1979 concerto for piano and string orchestra, a single track with a duration somewhat short of 25 minutes. It concludes with “The Four Temperaments,” a composition by Paul Hindemith given also the more abstract title “Theme and Four Variations.” The music was commissioned by George Balanchine, and the resulting ballet is known only by the “Four Temperaments” title. Between these two performances is an orchestral account of Hindemith’s “Symphony: Mathis der Maler.” The subtitle is that of an opera Hindemith had been planning about the painter Matthias Grünewald, and thematic material from the symphony eventually found its way into that opera.

There is an old joke about the monorail being an idea of the future whose time had passed. In his youth Hindemith was an adventurous (and occasionally raucous) composer. As might be guessed, the Nazis dismissed his work as “degenerate;” and he was wise enough to leave Germany before it was too late. He eventually found his way to the United States, where he became a member of the Music faculty at Yale University. By that time his interest in the past seemed to have taken the lead over his more adventurous side. However, that shift had already begun when he was working on his symphony in 1934 and was just as evident in the ballet score. (Where Balanchine was concerned, Hindemith’s music was a far cry from what Igor Stravinsky was providing him.)

In that context, anyone listening to this new album is likely to find the Hindemith selections to be a trip down memory lane. For my part, those are good memories; but I doubt that I shall visit them very frequently! Schnittke, on the other hand, first became an “item” during the last quarter of the last century, due primarily to a generous number of releases of his music by BIS. Most of these were ambitiously thorny, interspersed, occasionally, with ironic (if not sarcastic) reflections on the “old style.” If Noël Coward was best known for his “talent to amuse,” Schnittke seemed determined to establish a talent to provoke; and there is no shortage of provocations in his concerto. One might even think of the “Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra;” but P. D. Q. Bach was definitely funnier!

Some readers may recall my fondness for the joke that the monorail was “an idea of the future whose time had passed;” and, while I cannot argue with the skilled techniques of the performers on this new album, I fear that both Hindemith and Schnittke have become targets of that joke.