HINDEMITH : Bratsche! (Antoine Tamestit) (2013) 24-44.1Hz | FLAC (tracks), lossless

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

1-3    Sonate Für Bratsche Und Klavier Op.11 Nr.4
4-8    Sonate Für Bratsche Allein Op.25 Nr.1
9-11    Der Schwanendreher
12-15    Trauermusik

Conductor – Paavo Järvi (tracks: 9 to 15)
Orchestra – Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (tracks: 9 to 15)
Piano – Markus Hadulla (tracks: 1 to 3)
Viola – Antoine Tamestit

HINDEMITH : Violin Sonatas & Concerto (Frank Peter Zimmermann · Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra · Paavo Järvi · Enrico Pace) (2013) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

The music of Paul Hindemith can't be called crowd-pleasing. Even the overtly radical works of Schoenberg and Webern carried well-defined innovations that listeners might be excited by or reject, but with Hindemith there's always the sense that he is experimenting with the solution to a new problem each time out. Of course, this can just as easily be a stimulating challenge as a problem, and this collection of works for a single instrument from across Hindemith's career provides a good way into his music. Violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, joined in Hindemith's sole full-scale violin concerto (quite an underplayed work, perhaps because it is so atypical) by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi, deliver very strong performances expertly modulated to works of very different types. The performers show little faith in their audience by beginning with the Violin Concerto of 1939, for it really belongs at the end of the career traced by the four works for violin and piano or violin solo. The concerto is an unusually passionate work for Hindemith, and annotator Malcolm MacDonald is probably right in linking it to the composer's reaction to the outbreak of World War II. The smaller works are, true to form, all different: the Debussy-influenced Violin Sonata in E flat major, Op. 11/1, the almost whimsical Sonata for solo violin, Op. 31/2, the coolly abstract Violin Sonata in E major of 1935, and the entirely novel Violin Sonata in C major of 1939, each of whose movements is longer than the one that precedes it. Zimmermann and Järvi give a sense of this music as it unfolded against the backdrop of the Weimar Republic and the increasing Nazi cultural oppression that followed it, and they communicate something of the elusive whole that lies behind Hindemith's individual utterances. Highly recommended. James Manheim

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

1-3    Concerto For Violin And Orchestra (1939)    (27:15)
4-6    Sonata For Solo Violin, Op. 31 No. 2 (1924) 'Es Ist So Schönes Wetter Draußen'     (9:05)
7-9    Sonata In E Flat For Violin And Piano, Op. 11 No. 1 (1918)    (8:40)
10-11    Sonata In E For Violin And Piano (1935)    (9:10)
12-14    Sonata In C For Violin And Piano (1939)    (12:42)

Conductor – Paavo Järvi (tracks: 1 to 3)
Orchestra – Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (tracks: 1 to 3)
Piano – Enrico Pace (tracks: 8 to 14)
Violin – Frank Peter Zimmermann

MORTON FELDMAN : Neither (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Leonard, Zoltán Peskó) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

 This unusual, highly emotional fifty-minute work, performed here by soprano Sarah Leonard and the Radio Sinfonie Orchester Frankfurt conducted by Zoltan Pesko, with text by Samuel Beckett, is an "opera" perhaps only in the New Narrative Opera sense--the delivering of messages or meaningful images through words and music without the standard plot forms, dramatic contrasts, even casts of characters of traditional European-based opera. The soprano voice is obsessed with punctuated single tones, or, by contrast, bizarre melisma. Repeated, slowly phase-shifted pulses of astonishing harmonic color and melodic pattern are the basic gesture throughout the work--far more eerie and foreboding, with an interior tension not normal for, which is to say expected of, Feldman--"from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither ... as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once away turned from gently part again." This piece is an intense evocation of existentialist awe, the infinitely extended discovery of the present moment, the awareness of the impossibility and irrelevance of final definition. Sarah Leonard delivers a powerful and richly modulated realization with a great range of emotional energy and remarkable technique. "Blue" Gene Tyranny        Tracklist + Credits :