Bis 2024

Hindemith - Violin Concerto & Sonatas - Frank Peter Zimmermann (2013) {BIS-2024}
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© 2013 BIS Records | BIS-202
Classical / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music / Concerto

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.

Stravinsky, Bartók and Martinů were established international figures when they wrote these works for violin, travelling across Europe as well as the United States. With the onset of World War Two, all three composers would ultimately emigrate because of their rejection of fascism. In an age of political upheaval and cultural displacement, each of them found an individual approach to reinventing the language of tonal music, laying down roots in the west without abandoning their Eastern European identities. While the Russian-born Stravinsky was experimenting with possibilities of modern violin technique in his concerto, Martinů took these efforts a step further in his Suite concertante by blending the sounds of his native Bohemia with the colours of French neo-classicism. In the Rhapsodies, Bartók turned to the folk music of Hungary and Romania.

The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.

Carl Heinrich Graun is known as Frederick the Great's court Kapellmeister, but less well known is the fact that Graun enjoyed an important reputation as a singer and that the king had originally engaged him as such at his court. In his obituary, the king characteristically honoured his court Kapellmeister with the words: "We will not hear such a singer again"!

Although the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is best known as a symphonist, his constantly expanding catalogue includes numerous concertos as well as countless chamber works and arrangements of works by other composers. This disc brings together works from these three genres. The Guitar Concerto, dedicated to Ismo Eskelinen, posed many challenges for Aho, who is not a guitarist himself. It is a seven-movement work exploring the different ways the guitar can be used - sometimes with far from traditional techniques -and exploring its sonic possibilities.