After several months reviewing only DVDs, it's refreshing to get back to the CD format. The mind makes its own images in response to music, but with a DVD the monitor jumps in and offers its own images first, short-circuiting the process. There's something to be said for the music on its own.
Paul Hindemith (1895 to 1963) was an important German composer of the early 20th century. He acquired a reputation of being "anti-Romantic", but was nonetheless opposed to the hard-to-listen-to 12-tone style. Instead, he wrote traditional orchestral music with a modern twist. He acquired a following at least in part because of the
opposition of the Nazis to his music.
A new CD from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, under the young conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, has already received a 2005 Echo Award in Germany. It features three of Hindemith's best-known works. First comes Sinfonische Metamorphosen, a suite based on themes from the early 19th century composer Carl Maria von Weber. This is Hindemith at his most approachable, and a foretaste of Benjamin Britten's wonderful Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge very cheaply available on a fine CD, English String Music, Naxos 8.550823, albeit less astringent and startling than Britten's later work.
Then follows Die Vier Temperamante (The Four Temperaments), orchestral pieces with piano on what Medieval philosophers considered the four human types -- Melancholy, Sanguine, Phlegmatic and Choleric. The incomparable Emmanuel Ax plays the florid piano part, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays to the same high standard displayed on the rest of this CD.
Lastly comes the symphony Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter). Hindemith wrote it in 1933 at the request of Wilhelm Furtwangler, and its first performance, in 1934 by the Berlin Philharmonic under Otto Klemperer, was both a huge success and a public demonstration of opposition to Nazi policies. Historians note it was to prove the last such event, at least on this scale.
It's a homage to Matthias Grunewald, the great 16th century artist who painted the Isenheim Altar. The late German-born, naturalized British writer W.G. Sebald wrote the first sequence of his three-part poem After Nature about Grunewald, and it would be instructive to read this work after, or before, listening to Hindemith's symphony. It's published in the US by Random House's Modern Library, in a much-praised translation by Michael Hamburger. The symphony, incidentally, is also in three parts, mirroring the Isenheim triptych.
Grammy Award-winning US violinist Joshua Bell, 37, has been charming North American audiences for some time, as well as featuring on the sound tracks of such films as The Red Violin, Iris, Ladies in Lavender and, coming soon, Dreamer. On a new CD from Sony Classical he gives Tchaikovsky's Violin Concertoa truly spectacular interpretation. This live performance, recorded in January 2005, is enormously exciting. The return of the orchestra after the first movement's cadenza is heart-breakingly beautiful, as are many other moments. The sound quality is absolutely stunning, and no doubt even better in the SACD format in which this recording is also available.
The Berlin Philharmonic is routinely acknowledged as one of the world's three or four finest orchestras, and here under conductor Michael Tilson Thomas it plays with enormous warmth, clarity and incisiveness. This CD provides an excellent foretaste for this great orchestra's appearance in Taipei in November.
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