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April 19, 2010
Hindemith: Die Sieben Kammermusiken (Concerto Amsterdam, 1968 Telefunken LP set)
In the year 2010, the 'classic' avant garde is nearly a century old. Is it only me, or does the music of Reger, Hindemith and Schreker now seems as 'advanced', if not more so, than Russian-period Stravinsky and expressionist-era Schoenberg?The strongest work of Hindemith has retained an uncanny power very much at odds with the composer's conservative image. The quartets, piano sonatas and the present set of seven Chamber Concertos have an brutal anger (and a discreet melancholy) that is very compelling. Ignoring the novelistic conventions of the romantic concerto, which pits the soloist as individual against the orchestra as human society or the natural world, Hindemith maintains the even-textured motoric energy of the baroque concerto grosso. Elements of jazz and German popular music appear, reinforced by the small, ad hoc 'pit band' with prominent parts for brass instruments and accordion.
Hindemith may have excluded topical and political concerns from his mature instrumental music, but as a composer in the Weimar Republic he was eyewitness to two successive convulsions of modernity, the 'Great War' and the rise of Fascism. The anguished neurotic note-spinning of his own brand of 'Bach with wrong notes' is a very different music from that of the detached gadfly 'Modernsky'. With the passage of time, these works seem closer to Schoenberg's Suite Op 27 and Berg's "Kammerkonzert" than to the Stravinsky of 'Jeu de Cartes', the 'Octet' and the 'Dumbarton Oaks Concerto.'
I had a short-lived aversion to this music because the first 'Kammermusik' used to pop up whenever my IPod became confused and reset itself (the first three letters of Claudio's Abbado's surname puts him at the top of almost any alphabetical list of performers – now the IPod defaults to a German lady introducing his live recording of Mahler's 6th.) I found this terrific 1968 recording by the Concerto Amsterdam at a used bookshop in Chapel Hill, NC a few years back and loved it. These are great performances by a nascent semi-HIP ensemble (Jaap Schröder is terrific in the violin concerto), very well-recorded and beautifully packaged.
It makes a nice complement to a slightly later recording by the new music group Ensemble 13 (available at the Avant Garde Project archive as AGP152 and AGP153.) I like the two recordings equally – the Concerto Amsterdam release has the typically scholarly and detached feel of a Telefunken project, stressing the continuity with similar works by Corelli, Handel or Bach in natural, somewhat boxy sound. The Ensemble 13 set on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi gets the modernist elements across, and benefits from a slightly brighter, more transparent recording.
Concerto Amsterdam (3 LP set) FLAC – minimal declicking – with scans and track listing.
Originally from The High Pony Tail, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Apr 19, 2010 at 08:10 PM