Paul Hindemith.(Sound Recording Reviews)(Brief Article)(Sound Recording Review)

Paul Hindemith. Clarinet Chamber Music. John Bruce Yeh, Easley Blackwood, Amelia Piano Trio. Cedille CDR 90000 072, 2003.

Paul Hindemith remains one of the more contradictory figures in twentieth-century music--a self-professed guardian of the tonal tradition who nevertheless wrote some of the most difficult and "modernist" music of the century, a man of deep feeling and spirituality whose compositions nevertheless avoided the programmatic and the overtly emotional, and a composer who simultaneously expressed articulate disdain for the merely palliative and pleasant in music and yet coined the term "gebrauchmusik" to describe (approvingly) music that is specifically utilitarian. Whatever his philosophical inconsistencies, these contradictions only enriched Hindemith's music, as can be discerned readily in his chamber works for clarinet. This remarkable recording is naturally, if unevenly, divided between the small-scale and relatively approachable Sonata for Clarinet and Piano of 1939 and ...