# SS 04.10.14 - Hindemith "Mathis Der Maler"



## realdealblues

A continuation of the Saturday Symphonies Tradition:

Welcome to another weekend of symphonic listening!

For your listening pleasure this weekend:*

Paul Hindemith (1895 - 1963)*

Symphony: "Mathis Der Maler" (Matthias The Painter)

1. Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert)
2. Grablegung (Entombment)
3. Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of Saint Anthony)

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Post what recording you are going to listen to giving details of Orchestra / Conductor / Chorus / Soloists etc - Enjoy!


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## realdealblues

Happy that another Saturday Symphony is here again. I'm not overly familiar with this work but I know that I like it. Looking forward to hearing it again. I think this weekend I will listen to:

View attachment 52499

Leonard Bernstein/Israel Philharmonic Orchestra


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## Cosmos

This is a work I have yet to hear, but is on my list. So glad that this Saturday's symphony has come up!

IT seems that the recording I picked up for my collection is actually of Hindemith himself conducting the Berlin Philharmonic!


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## Blancrocher

Blomstedt's for me.


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## GioCar

Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker










Anybody familiar with the opera? Any recommendations?


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## realdealblues

GioCar said:


> Anybody familiar with the opera? Any recommendations?


While I'm not familiar with it, the most commonly referenced recording I have seen over the years is Rafael Kubelik's which features Fischer-Dieskau and James King. If I were going to get one, it would be that one.


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## Mahlerian

I had to find a library copy for this one, so...

Albert/Sydney Symphony









It's been a little while since I've heard the piece.


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## Rhythm

Like Blancrocher, I've chosen *Blomstedt*, however, this performance is LIVE with Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester at Royal Albert Hall, 2010.

Beware to those who consider a video's visual, which isn't perfect here. My listening doesn't require perfectly clear visuals when considering YTube previews for Saturday Symphonies.

My first-time listening is now into the second half of the video, and so far the sound of the recording hasn't threatened my carefully reserved  lambent sensibilities.


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## starthrower

Love it! I have a couple symphony versions, and the Kubelik opera.


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## Haydn man

GioCar said:


> Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker


New work for me and I shall try this via Spotify


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## hpowders

I've always found Hindemith to be a bit "heavy". His violin concerto needs to be revived, however. It's a fine work.


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## Alfacharger

I'll give Steinberg and the BSO a spin. I love the old DG album cover.










I also have the opera on lp.


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## Balthazar

I'll be listening to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I am not at all familiar with this work.


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## D Smith

I’m really appreciating Saturday Symphonies as they make me listen to works I haven’t thought of in a long time. (I hope I don’t lose points for listening on a Friday!) I’ve only heard Mathis der Maler in concert and didn’t have a recording of it. So I listened and watched the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Serge Baudo perform it on YT and really enjoyed the work. This is a piece I’ll definitely be returning to.


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## Richannes Wrahms

I have a Karajan recording of this work in which at one of the climaxes of the first movement the violins (I think) produce a horrible sharp inflection, almost like a screech. For years I thought it was intended, that it was supposed to be an anticlimax. I know string players hate performing this work. I'll listen to the Abbado posted above.


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## brotagonist

Blancrocher said:


> View attachment 52500
> 
> 
> Blomstedt's for me.


Me, too, since I bought that very set about six months ago


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## aimee

The first time I listen to Hindemith's work...

from this page, for a quick pick, I've selected one with Hindemith conducted his own composition with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
http://classical-music-online.net/en/listen/80110


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## senza sordino

I don't know this piece at all. This version is available for me on Spotify
View attachment 52538


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## PetrB

senza sordino said:


> I don't know this piece at all. This version is available for me on Spotify
> View attachment 52538


That should do rather nicely 

The first movement, to me, is especially 'inspired,' and simply 'beautiful,' imo, of course. I have a vicarious thrill thinking the piece is completely unknown and new to you, remembering when it was to me!


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## Skilmarilion

senza sordino said:


> I don't know this piece at all.


Same here.

I'm playing Blomstedt with the Mahler Youth Orchestra, from the 2010 Proms.


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## elgar's ghost

senza sordino said:


> I don't know this piece at all. This version is available for me on Spotify
> View attachment 52538


This was the first Hindemith disc I ever owned. To be honest, I bought it out of curiosity because the Violin Concerto featured Hindemith conducting and David Oistrakh playing but I grew to like all three works and I was a Hindemith fan from then on.


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## Nereffid

elgars ghost said:


> This was the first Hindemith disc I ever owned. To be honest, I bought it out of curiosity because the Violin Concerto featured Hindemith conducting and David Oistrakh playing but I grew to like all three works and I was a Hindemith fan from then on.


It was my introduction to Hindemith too... it's one of my favourite albums still.

This was the cover of my copy:


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## elgar's ghost

Nereffid said:


> It was my introduction to Hindemith too... it's one of my favourite albums still.
> 
> This was the cover of my copy:
> View attachment 52566


Yes - that's the cover of the original full price edition, I believe. I never understood what the dead poultry was all about - any ideas, Nereffid?


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## Triplets

I discovered in my collection that I also had Horenstein's recording, which I just listened to, after playing Blomstedt/SFSO twice.
I really admire Horenstein as a Conductor, but I feel that his 3rd Movement falls pretty flat here. Blomstedt does a lot better job pacing and building the movement to a climax, and JH just sort of flails around. Not what I would have expected from a Conductor who made the most sizzling Nielsen/5 ever recorded.


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## TurnaboutVox

I went with:

*Hindemith - Mathis der Maler (Symphony)*
Jascha Horenstein, London Symphony Orchestra
[Chandos, rec. 1992]


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## Mika

From library : Claudio Abbado / Berliner Philharmoniker







From Spotify : Albert/Sydney


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## Dave Whitmore

I'm in! I'll have to wait til late tonight to listen to it. But I want to experience as much new music as I can and this Saturday Symphony idea is perfect!


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## AClockworkOrange

I'm going to be somewhat late to the party when I can actually listen to the piece but I will be going with Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker when I get the chance.


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## TurnaboutVox

senza sordino said:


> I don't know this piece at all. This version is available for me on Spotify
> View attachment 52538


The other two works on that disc are also well worth hearing, Senza, if you don't already know them. The Violin Concerto has been my favourite 'orchestral' Hindemith work for a long time.


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## Ian Moore

I don't want to rude...I really genuinely want to know...Why do people like Hindemith?


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## starthrower

Ian Moore said:


> I don't want to rude...I really genuinely want to know...Why do people like Hindemith?


Hindemith wrote an awful lot of music. If you spend some time exploring, you'll most likely encounter some pieces to your liking.There's so much music there including loads of chamber pieces, piano sonatas, operas, concertos, symphonic works, organ music, choral music, solo harp sonata, etc...


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## PetrB

Hindemith wrote a ton of music, much of it, from early enough on, "music by the yard" which he wrote very quickly. I prefer his earlier 'bad-boy' works -- the earlier of the Kammermusik series, especially the first (thumbing his nose, the rest of the fingers of that hand waving at us) and the fourth.

Kammermusik No. 4









I think Mathis der Maler still holds up -- though as much as people rave, the bits of the opera I've heard sound to me at times painfully 'academic.'

After moving to the states, he codified his theory, and I believe then completely bought his ordering of harmony, 'tonal law,' hook, line and sinker, and then followed that slavishly, leaving the later works sounding interchangeable with each other, like polished exercises in "Hindemithian Harmony," but which had absolutely nothing else to say while they 'make a sound' well enough. He had stopped writing from the quicker and fresher intuitive (that coupled with of course having theory at his disposal) and instead wrote only using theory -- and those later works to me are pretty effin dull.

Any or all of it was much more interesting to me in my early-later teens, when 'that kind of music' was far less past in time then it is now. The symphony Mathis der Maler, a friend said, responding to exactly your question, is "_good old-fashioned music making and counterpoint, but with newer harmony."_ That counterpoint -- in spades -- not only near identical in procedure to North European 18th century practice, but all the music rife with all those dotted eighth-sixteenth and other favored rhythmic habits which are from long ago and easy identifying traits, i.e. 'this is German music.' All those very worn and familiar handles, a newer harmony (even when it was new a bit conservative-ish, and now, screamingly so), make him a very accessible and 'non-problematic' listen for many.

His active time, even the later of it, is now fifty years ago, and for many listeners who are 'new' to more early modern music, that harmony isn't much new or news to any more. Then any 'novelty' is not the feature but if the music says something to them. Little of it says much to me now which was of some interest decades earlier.

The whole phenomenon of composing from the take off points of established styles and innovations of other composers, say Messiaen and Carter but two bases of the new-complexity bandwagoners, has me finding much of that drier than dust, music by those later jumping in started and finished with only theoretic premises in mind, and I guess that is typical _within any stylistic movement_ that there will be a few original sparklers and it dries up very quickly after that. Hindemith's story is not unique, but I find it a bit unique that he was first the sparkler and then 'converted himself' into being a sort of after the fact dryly theoretic imitator -- of himself. I can not think of many composers who started out fresh and innovative, then codified their harmonic universe and followed that 'by their own book', and in so doing became so quickly dull slaves to their own textbooks and parodies of their former selves.

When I purchased a set of the Kammermusik in the 90's -- out of recollect and wanting to hear them again after many years -- the clerk at the then bricks 'n' mortar CD store said, "They're fun." How things change as to the importance of a composer or piece over half or three-quarters of a century


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## starthrower

I never understood the so-called "bad boy" label. Must have been some reactionary stance from some very conservative people.


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## JACE

Balthazar said:


> I'll be listening to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I am not at all familiar with this work.
> 
> View attachment 52533


Me too. Mine's the vinyl release instead of the CD.


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## elgar's ghost

starthrower said:


> I never understood the so-called "bad boy" label. Must have been some reactionary stance from some very conservative people.


Hindemith had numerous arty avant-garde friends and wrote two or three short works for the theatre which could be considered risque - in Germany back in 1920-21 that was probably enough to qualify even though it all seems rather mild now.


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## Richannes Wrahms

PetrB said:


> I can not think of many composers who started out fresh and innovative, then codified their harmonic universe and followed that 'by their own book', and in so doing became so quickly dull slaves to their own textbooks and parodies of their former selves.


I can, but I won't say.


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## Guest

Ian Moore said:


> I don't want to rude...I really genuinely want to know...Why do people like Hindemith?


I don't want to rude...I really genuinely want to know...Why would anyone listen to YOUR compositions?

Silly questions are silly, aren't they.


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## PetrB

Triplets said:


> I discovered in my collection that I also had Horenstein's recording, which I just listened to, after playing Blomstedt/SFSO twice.
> I really admire Horenstein as a Conductor, but I feel that his 3rd Movement falls pretty flat here. Blomstedt does a lot better job pacing and building the movement to a climax, and JH just sort of flails around. Not what I would have expected from a Conductor who made the most sizzling Nielsen/5 ever recorded.


Have your heard the Nielsen 5 with Bernstein and the NYphil? One of the best recordings he made of anything. Check it out!


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## PetrB

starthrower said:


> I never understood the so-called "bad boy" label. Must have been some reactionary stance from some very conservative people.


Kammermusik No.1 (1921)









I imagine Schoenberg was not exactly a household name within / throughout Germany, and doubt that Le Sacre, in any version, had hit the streets there either (I think the score of Le Sacre, with some revision, did not become available until that much longer after its premiere, sometime post 1921).

This Kammermuzik No. 1 then, is rowdy, vulgar, rude, and _"in your face"_ re: all conventional (local) expectations when it was first written and premiered. Today, yes, with the impossible to erase aural memories of so much else, they do sound more just kinda "fun."


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## Marschallin Blair

PetrB said:


> Have your heard the Nielsen 5 with Bernstein and the NYphil? One of the best recordings he made of anything. Check it out!


_Especially_ his hard-charging first movement.

-- Definately a recording that deserves a remaster.


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## Vaneyes

Itsa belated *Hindemith*: Mathis der Maler happening for me. I'll be listening/comparing the two I've owned for years, SFS/Blomstedt (rec.1987), and Suisse Romande/Kletzki (rec.1968).

It's been a while since I've heard the work or listened to these recs. Maybe I'll have a revelation, and change my mind about which one is "best". Or, maybe I won't.

FTWGAS, the answer will be on the "Current Listening" thread.:tiphat:


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