DESCRIPTION:
Kammermusik No. 7, concerto for organ & orchestra, Op. 46/2 (1921)

I. Nicht zu schnell
II. Sehr langsam und ganz ruhig (3:24)
III. [Achtel bis 184] (10:24)

Leo Van Doeselaar, organ

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly

The seven works which Paul Hindemith entitled Kammermusik are creations of the 1920s: of his own first artistic maturity, and of a post-war musical era which was in reaction from the emotional excesses of late Romanticism and Expressionism -trying to find a way back, instead, to the ideals of formal clarity and a modest pride in craftsmanship which seemed to be represented by the Baroque. Hindemith's early works had flirted with Regeresque chromaticism, the cult of the bizarre, even (in the opera Sancta Susanna) with Expressionistic emotional overkill. Yet his instincts had always been towards the 'objective' musical values of strong polyphonic interest, firm structure, a Baroque stability of motion. In the Kammermusik series he brought these aspects of his musical personality to full fruition, and defined at the same time an influential Neo-classical impulse in contemporary German music, just as Igor Stravinsky in Paris was issuing the rallying-cry of 'Back to Bach!'. Indeed, in one sense, Hindemith's seven Kammermusik compositions - the first of them a suite for twelve instruments, the others concertos for a variety of solo instruments, with orchestras of different sizes and constitutions - is a kind of twentieth century equivalent of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

They were composed in three batches, not entirely corresponding to the three separate opus numbers under which they were published. Kammermusik No. 7 was written in 1921, and grouped in op.24 along with a piece for wind quintet - the five-movement Kleine Kammermusik. The first three of the op.36 concertos followed in 1924-25; while the last of op.36, and the two concertos of op.47, were all written in 1927. Hindemith, a viola player of international calibre, was himself the soloist in the premieres of the concertos for viola (Kammermusik No.5) and for viola d'amore (Kammermusik No.6). But his capacities as a practical, versatile all-round musician and performer are embodied most impressively throughout the various works; and demonstrated by his claim that, in the whole of the op.36 concertos, he had composed no instrumental part he personally could not have played, with a little practice!

The last of the series, Kammermusik No.7, op.46 no.2, is a concerto for organ and eleven wind instruments, plus a few cellos and a double bass. Hindemith composed it to inaugurate the new organ of Frankfurt Radio, the organization (then headed by his brother-in-law Hans Flesch) to which the work is dedicated. The radio station broadcast the first performance in January 1928, with Reinhold Merten as soloist. The grandest and most festive of all the concertos, it is also the only one in the conventional three movements; and Hindemith makes good use of all the polyphonic possibilities offered by the nature of the solo instrument. The first movement is a good-humoured, at times comically self-important march; but it is succeeded by a large and deeply expressive slow movement, opening with a long, ruminative organ solo. As the music develops into spacious polyphonic fantasy the orchestral textures and almost religious atmosphere of meditation seem to anticipate parts of Hindemith's great opera Mathis der Mafer. The finale is an excitable fast fugue, its upwardly-aspiring subject announced by solo trumpet. The organ soon steers the discourse into areas of grandeur, and the contrapuntal contest varies between light and serious before the final series of stretti brings the concerto to a close in a mood of muscular festivity. --Calum MacDonald

Art by Joseph Cornell