More Hindemith Trios

This may well be the first time on this blog that I have offered the same work in consecutive posts, or even featured the same composer. But Nick's recent postings, at Grumpy's Classics Cave, of Mozart and Beethoven string trios played by the Pougnet-Riddle-Pini trio reminded me that I had their valuable coupling of the two Hindemith trios in its third Westminster incarnation, as part of their "Collectors' Series", a mid-60s reissue series derived from monaural chamber music recordings of a decade earlier (and, thankfully, not "updated" with fake stereo trickery):

Hindemith: Two String Trios (No. 1, Op. 34; No. 2, 1933)
Jean Pougnet, violin; Frederick Riddle, viola; Anthony Pini, cello
Recorded in the autumn of 1954
Westminster W-9067, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 110.32 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 72.90 MB)

I am indebted to Nick, not only for inspiring this post, but also for rendering practical service in eliminating the results of an awful gouge in the vinyl on the first side, affecting the first minute or so of the Op. 34 trio.

While I was working on the above transfer, it occurred to me that if I transferred one more LP, I could have available on this blog all the recordings of Hindemith's string trios to be made before the advent of digital recording (including the ones the composer participated in). I am not aware of any other recording of No. 2 besides the one I posted last month, but of No. 1, besides the incomplete one by the Amar-Hindemith Trio, a stereo LP version was made in 1968 by three young German musicians, coupled with the first recording, by a different ensemble, of Hindemith's Op. 16 string quartet:

Hindemith: String Trio No. 1, Op. 34
Rainer Kussmaul, violin; Jürgen Kussmaul, viola; Jürgen Wolf, cello
and
Hindemith: String Quartet No. 3 (old No. 2) in C, Op. 16
Schäffer Quartet (Schäffer-Szabados-Pill-Racz)
Recorded in the summer of 1968
Musical Heritage Society OR-H-297, one stereo LP record
Link (FLAC files, 239.37 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 85.52 MB)

This recording was made by an independent German recording company, Da Camera, in Heidelberg, and was part of a 9-disc retrospective of Hindemith's chamber music. In Germany the series was published as a box set, whereas in the USA each record was obtainable separately. Of the three musicians playing the Op. 34 trio, only one is still with us: Jürgen Kussmaul, born in 1944, was two years older than brother Rainer, who departed this life only last year. The cellist, Jürgen Wolf, was born in 1938 and died in 2014. Their playing of Op. 34 contrasts markedly with that the Pougnet ensemble; the latter really dig into the music while the Germans are more careful and always beautiful-sounding. The Pougnet's approach is much closer to the Amar-Hindemith's in the two movements where direct comparisons are possible.

Hindemith: String Trio No. 2 (Goldberg, Hindemith, Feuermann)

Front of booklet for Columbia Set 209

This may not be a particularly rare recording, having been reissued numerous times on CD labels devoted to historical recordings (the current availability of these, however, may be another matter). But I have come across a nice early US pressing of the set, complete with its booklet of program notes containing an analysis of the piece (by Roy Harris, of all people), and so here it is:

Hindemith: String Trio No. 2 (1933)
The Hindemith Trio (Goldberg-Hindemith-Feuermann)
Recorded January 21, 1934
Columbia Masterworks Set No. 209, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 64.74 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 42.17 MB)

This set has the distinction of containing the first work of Hindemith to be issued on records in the USA on domestic pressings (April, 1935); hitherto, American record collectors interested in Hindemith had to rely on imported pressings (mostly from Polydor). The recording remained available until the end of Columbia's production and sale of classical 78s, about 1951 or so.

The week of this recording saw a flurry of activity in the studio for these three gentlemen. Also on January 21 (a Sunday), Goldberg and Hindemith recorded a Mozart duo (K. 424), then, the following day, the full trio recorded Beethoven's Serenade (Op. 8). On Tuesday, January 23, Goldberg had to leave for a concert tour; coming to the studio to bid his colleagues farewell, he found them listening to the playback of a Scherzo that Hindemith had written that morning for himself and Feuermann! This was intended as a filler for a recording Hindemith made the same day, on five 10-inch sides, of his solo viola sonata (Op. 25, No. 1), though in the end it was not used as such, being released instead in the Columbia History of Music, Vol. 5. On Saturday, January 27, Feuermann recorded Hindemith's solo cello sonata to complete this valuable little group of recordings. All of them were made available on American Columbia during the 1930s, though only the two trios and the Scherzo survived the purge of wartime deletions.

Happy Birthday, Paul Hindemith!

Paul Hindemith, 1923

This is a recording that I had meant to upload last year for Hindemith's 120th birthday (he was born November 16, 1895), but I got rather busy and in the end, the only composer anniversary I celebrated last autumn was Sibelius' 150th. Well, what's a year between friends? And so, for Hindemith's 121st birthday on Wednesday, here is his fellow viola player, the incomparable William Primrose, in his first sonata for the instrument:

Hindemith: Sonata in F Major, Op. 11, No. 4
William Primrose, viola; Jesús Maria Sanromá, piano
Recorded November 18, 1938
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set M-547, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 38.48 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 26.42 MB)

Hindemith's Opus 11 consists of no less than six sonatas, all written in 1918-19, for various stringed instruments with and without piano.  The first two are violin sonatas with piano, the third a sonata for cello and piano, the fourth for viola and piano, the fifth for viola unaccompanied, and the sixth (unpublished during his lifetime) for violin unaccompanied. He was to add further examples of each combination to his oeuvre, the viola being particularly favored with three accompanied and four unaccompanied sonatas in total.

This is the first of three recordings pianist Sanromá would make of Hindemith's music for Victor during the late 1930s; in the spring of 1939 he would join the composer for recordings of a sonata for piano duet and of the third accompanied viola sonata.

Reger: String Trio in A Minor (Amar-Hindemith Trio)

This is one of those recordings that I am particularly excited to possess and to share; however, about 98% of the excitement derives from the identities of the performers rather than of the composer, for Max Reger (1873-1916) is, for me, a problematical figure in music history. I respect Reger as a craftsman and as a carrier of the Austro-German chamber music tradition, but as much as I've tried, I can't really like his music. (I do retain some fondness for his orchestral Serenade, Op. 95, and its neighboring opus, the Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue for two pianos, Op. 96 - with its comically interminable fugue subject culminating in a trill that sounds almost as an afterthought!) Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the weight of this tradition bogged him down - and those works without such weight, such as the serenades and string trios, seem to be more successful as a result. Certainly committed performances help. I remember reading somewhere (alas, I can't remember where) that Reger was a strong influence on Paul Hindemith as a budding composer, so it's not at all surprising that he and his cohorts should turn out a performance of this string trio that makes it sound as one of Reger's more enjoyable works:

Reger: String Trio No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 77b
The Amar Trio (Walter Caspar, Paul Hindemith, Rudolf Hindemith)
Recorded c. 1927
Polydor 66575 through 66577, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 56.18 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 37.25 MB)

For those unaware (as I was, until about six weeks ago), the super-rare acoustical version of the Amar Quartet's performance of Hindemith's Quartet, Op. 22, has been reissued in download format by a German outfit called Archiphon Records, and in quite a good transfer, too. It's well worth buying (which one can do here), but for those not wanting to download, the various tracks have been "autogenerated" as YouTube videos (a search on "amar hindemith archiphon" should bring them up).

Hindemith: Mathis der Maler (Ormandy, 1940)

Matthias Grünewald: Temptation of St. Anthony

This week I present Eugene Ormandy's first recording of the Hindemith work that he recorded more than any other (three times, in 1940, 1952 and 1962) - the celebrated symphony extracted from the 1934 opera Mathis der Maler, its movements inspired by three of the panels that Matthias Grünewald contributed to the Isenheim Altarpiece 500 years ago. For all intents and purposes, this recording represented the general American record-buyer's introduction to this piece; an earlier one had been made by Telefunken in 1934, with Hindemith himself conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (his conducting debut on records), but one imagines that it did not receive much currency at the time because of Hindemith's position as persona non grata with the Nazi regime. In any case, the Telefunken set didn't receive widespread distribution in the USA until 1949, when Capitol repressed it in its new Captol-Telefunken series. Meanwhile, Ormandy's version had appeared on the US market seven years previously:

Hindemith: Mathis der Maler, symphony (1934)
Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra
Recorded October 20, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-854, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 58.01 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 40,62 MB)

The same session also produced this recording of a symphony by Harl McDonald, in addition to works by Sibelius, Barber and three sides featuring soprano Dorothy Maynor - 23 sides in all! It was to be Ormandy's only Philadelphia session in the 1940-41 season not shared with another conductor, so he must have been inclined to make the most of it. (Stokowski's last two regular Philadelphia sessions, incidentally, occurred in December that season. The first of these produced the world première recording of Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony.)

The Modern Age of Brass (Roger Voisin)

A couple of months ago, I was researching old Schwann catalogues to try and discover the deletion date of this LP by the New Art Wind Quintet, Since a work by Nicolai Berezowsky was the guiding force behind my posting that recording, I searched under Berezowsky's name in the Schwanns that I have from the late 50s, and found that there was one other LP available with his music, a brass piece coupled with music by Dahl, Hindemith and somebody else unknown to me. I saw this several times before I realized, "hold on, I think I may have that LP!" I checked my collection and sure enough, there was a copy, which I had found some 30 years ago when I wanted to hear the Dahl piece. I had learned that its second movement was the theme for WQXR's long-running radio program "Music at First Hearing" - on which a panel of well-known music critics like Irving Kolodin, Martin Bookspan and others reviewed new record releases on the spot without advance knowledge of what they were, a sort of "What's My Line" for record collectors. Here is the LP in question:

"The Modern Age of Brass":
Ingolf Dahl: Music for Brass Instruments (1944)
Hindemith: Morgenmusik (1932)
Nicolai Berezowsky: Brass Suite, Op. 24 (pub. 1942)
Robert Sanders: Quintet in B-Flat (1942)
Roger Voisin and His Brass Ensemble
Issued in December, 1956
Unicorn UNLP-1031, one LP record
Link (FLAC files, 96.71 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 69.65 MB)

Roger Voisin (1918-2008) was the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony from 1950 to 1966, and he leads an ensemble of fellow BSO members on this recording, made for an independent Boston label called Unicorn Records (not to be confused with the much better-known British label of the same name from two decades later). The label, whose recordings were produced by Peter Bartók, the composer's son, lasted only two or three years before being subsumed by Kapp Records in 1958.  Kapp kept most of Voisin's Unicorn records in its own catalogue through the 1960s, including this one.

Ortenberg, Foss and the Budapest Quartet

Cover design by Alex Steinweiss

For a dozen years, beginning in 1932, one half of the famed Budapest String Quartet consisted of the Schneider brothers - Alexander as second violinist and Mischa as cellist.  Then in 1944, Alexander decided to strike out on his own with other projects (for example, a fruitful partnership with harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick), and he was replaced in the Quartet by the Odessa-born Edgar Ortenberg (1900-1996).  One of the first recording projects with Ortenberg, and in fact the first Budapest Quartet recording with him to be released, was this Mozart quintet with another frequent Budapest collaborator, Milton Katims (1909-2006):

Mozart: String Quintet in C Major, K. 515
Budapest String Quartet (Roisman-Ortenberg-Kroyt-Schneider)
with Milton Katims, second viola
Recorded February 6 and April 23, 1945
Columbia Masterworks MM-586, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 80.06 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 54.29 MB)

At about the same time, Ortenberg made his only American recording as a violin soloist, this first recording of a Hindemith violin sonata:

Hindemith: Sonata in E (1935) and
Foss: Dedication (1944)
Edgar Ortenberg, violin; Lukas Foss, piano
Issued May, 1944
Hargail set MW-300, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 43.73 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 27.12 MB)

This would also appear to be Lukas Foss' first appearance on record as either pianist or composer.  He was in his early 20s at the time.

Hindemith from the Recording Horn

Happy May Day! Some fifteen months ago, when I uploaded the Los Angeles Wind Quintet's recording of Hindemith's delightful Kleine Kammermusik, I expressed the hope that I might someday be able to hear the work's first recording, an acoustical version by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Quintet, anachronistic as that may seem. (It was one of Polydor's very last acoustical recordings.) Well, my wish has been granted, for a copy has recently come my way, and you, my loyal audience, get to hear it too:

Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Wind Quintet
Recorded c. 1925
Polydor 66376 and 66377, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 43.10 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 26.09 MB)

The performance is very good, especially considering that the work was written (and published) a mere three years before this recording was made, and its idiom would have been equally new to the Leipzig players - who, Jolyon tells us (in connection with his very welcome upload of their recording of August Klughardt's Quintet), were Carl Bartuzat, flute; Walter Heinze, oboe; Willi Schreinicke, clarinet; Gunther Weigelt, bassoon; and Richard Schaller, horn. Only Bartuzat's year of birth is known for sure, and he was thirteen years older than the composer. This was the first recording of a work by Hindemith in which the composer himself didn't actually perform, and the playing, like Hindemith's own, is spirited and in certain spots a bit rough-and-ready. Enjoy!

Beethoven and Hindemith by the Amar Quartet

The Amar Quartet:
(L to R) Licco Amar, Walter Caspar, Paul Hindemith, Rudolf Hindemith

What do you do if you're a young composer hoping to make a splash with a new string quartet you've submitted to a music festival, only to find that the group assigned to perform it refuses to do so? Why, start your own quartet, of course. The composer was Paul Hindemith, the quartet his Op. 16, the festival the one for new music at Donaueschingen, in its inaugural year of 1921, and the recalcitrant musicians the Havemann Quartet. So the viola-playing Hindemith and his cello-playing brother Rudolf set about finding two violinists to give the performance with, and the Amar Quartet (often known informally as the Amar-Hindemith Quartet) was born. The group had such a success with Hindemith's quartet that they decided to become a permanent ensemble, and began giving regular concerts in 1922. And Hindemith wrote another new quartet specifically for the group, which turned out to be his finest work in the genre:

Hindemith: String Quartet, Op. 22
The Amar Quartet (Amar-Caspar-P. Hindemith-R. Hindemith)
Recorded c. 1926
Polydor 66422 through 66424, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 60.58 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 37.03 MB)

This is actually the second recording of the work they made; the first was acoustical, and is so rare that I don't expect to actually hear it in this lifetime. Their electrical recordings are rare enough, though more numerous, and include two Mozart quartets, the Verdi E minor, the first recording anywhere of music by Bartók (the Second Quartet - available from Satyr), and this one by Beethoven:

Beethoven: Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95
The Amar Quartet (Amar-Caspar-P. Hindemith-R. Hindemith)
Recorded c. 1927
Polydor 66571 through 66573, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 56.97 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 33.49 MB)

This occupies five sides of the three records; the set is completed by three more sides devoted to part of another Hindemith opus, to produce an oddly mismatched four-record set:

Hindemith: String Trio No. 1, Op. 34 - First and second movements
The Amar Trio (Caspar-P. Hindemith-R. Hindemith)
Recorded c. 1927
Polydor 66573 and 66574, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 31.61 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 19.73 MB)

It isn't known whether more of the work (there are two additional movements) was recorded, but my hunch is that it was, and not passed for issue due to technical deficiencies, as pitch instability is evident on the last side actually issued.

Enjoy - and before anyone asks, these are all the Amar-Hindemith 78s I possess, for which I consider myself very fortunate indeed!

Hindemith by the Los Angeles Wind Quintet

Good things come in small packages, goes the old cliché, and it's certainly true in this case.  Hindemith's delightful wind quintet, "Kleine Kammermusik" - the second part of an opus that also includes the first of his seven chamber concertos under the collective title of "Kammermusik" - may be small in size but it's big in entertainment value.  It's played here by a quintet of Hollywood studio musicians consisting of Haakon Bergh, flute; Gordon Pope, oboe; D. H. McKenney, clarinet; Don Christlieb, bassoon; and Jack Cave, horn.  The two players whose dates I have been able to trace online (Bergh and Christlieb) were both young men in their twenties when this recording was made, and I imagine the others were similarly young, for they are fully in sympathy with Hindemith's idiom:

Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2
The Los Angeles Wind Quintet
Recorded c. 1939
Columbia Masterworks set MX-149, two 10-inch 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 32.88 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 22.40 MB)

Incredibly, this is not the first recording of the piece; an earlier one was made acoustically by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Wind Quintet for Deutsche Grammophon-Polydor.  This, I expect, is ultra rare, and I hope to hear it someday before I die, although I cannot imagine it would be as fine as this Los Angeles performance.

Hindemith by the Guilet Quartet

Yes, another LP, but this time one that's taken from 78-rpm originals.  Truth to tell, I wish I had those 78 originals, because there's at least one side join in Concert Hall's c. 1950 transfer that I know I could have done a better job with, simply because I have technology that wasn't available to the good folks at Concert Hall Society back then.  But I suspect this LP is easier to come by than the 78s, simply because the 78s were part of a subscription package whereby the subscriber had to buy all the releases for a given year (and besides that, they were expensive, and a limited edition to boot), whereas the LP was a general release that remained in the catalog until 1957.  So here it is, this first (and, I believe, the only pre-digital) recording of this early Hindemith quartet:

Hindemith: Quartet No. 4 [new No. 5], Op. 32
Guilet String Quartet (Guilet-Gorodetzky-Brieff-Laporte)
Recorded c. 1947
Concert Hall CHS-1086, one ten-inch LP record
Link (FLAC files, 56.72 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 41.38 MB)

In this post I had some tart comments about the confusing issue of the numbering of Hindemith's quartets.

Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky for Band

Cover painting by Russell Connor

As I mentioned earlier, I spent much of the summer enjoying the fruits of the new Mercury Living Presence CD box, and gained thereby an idea or two for future transfers.  Well, here's one of them realized.  The box contained nine discs conducted by Frederick Fennell (1914-2004), who, arguably, did more to raise awareness of the serious literature for wind band than anyone else (much as his colleague at the Eastman School of Music, Howard Hanson, did for American music).  Included among Fennell's recordings in the series of Mercury CD reissues of the 1990s (from which the box set were derived) are fine works for band by the likes of Holst, Vaughan Williams, Grainger, Khatchaturian, Milhaud, Persichetti and Morton Gould, but inexplicably ignored was this issue:

Hindemith: Symphony in B-Flat (1951)
Schoenberg: Theme and Variations, Op. 43a (1943)
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947)
Eastman Wind Ensemble conducted by Frederick Fennell
Recorded March 24, 1957
Mercury Golden Imports SRI-75057, one stereo LP record
Link (FLAC files, 160.95 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 54.10 MB)

In the case of the Schoenberg work (which also exists in a version for full orchestra, Op. 43b), this was a first recording.

The Incomparable Emanuel Feuermann

Emanuel Feuermann

Today I present three recordings featuring the man whom many, myself included, consider the greatest cellist of all time, the tragically short-lived Emanuel Feuermann (1902-1942).  He really should have lived into the era of stereo recording, but he died at age 39 of complications from an operation for hemorrhoids; Toscanini, who was one of the pallbearers at his funeral, is said to have wept during the procession, saying, "this is murder!"  At the time of his death, Feuermann was planning to take up the viola da gamba, so that he could present Bach's three sonatas for that instrument as authentically as possible.

Despite the short time available to him, he left a precious recorded legacy.  But, alas, no unaccompanied Bach suites - I suppose these works were perceived at the time as belonging to Casals, so Feuermann never got to record one - so the closest we can get to what that may have sounded like is via his 1938 set of a Reger suite, and this unaccompanied sonata by his friend, Paul Hindemith:

Hindemith: Sonata for unaccompanied cello, Op. 25, No. 3
Emanuel Feuermann, cello
Recorded January 27, 1934
Japanese Columbia S-1032, one 78-rpm record
Link (FLAC file, 22.17 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 9.3 MB)

Feuermann left us several concerto recordings, including a wonderful Brahms Double with Heifetz, and this one of the Haydn D major:

Haydn: Cello Concerto in D major, Op. 101
Emanuel Feuermann with orchestra conducted by Dr. Malcolm Sargent
Recorded November 25, 1935
Columbia Masterworks set MM-262, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 76.38 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 37.26)

On a personal note: this is the third copy of MM-262 that I have owned; the first one I had as a boy of ten, inherited from the discarded 78 library of Emory University, where my mother was teaching music at the time.  It was my introduction to Feuermann's art, and to this day the Haydn D major is my favorite of all cello concertos, largely on the strength of this recording.

Finally, for fans of Eugene Ormandy, another of his early Victor recordings, featuring Feuermann - the first of four recordings Ormandy was to make of Strauss' "Don Quixote," but the only one with a cellist other than first-desk Philadelphia players:

Richard Strauss: Don Quixote, Op. 35
Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Emanuel Feuermann, cello
Samuel Lifschey, viola
Alexander Hilsberg, violin
Recorded February 24, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-720, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 87.25)
Link (MP3 file, 45.26)

Three by the Budapest Quartet

 

The reissue program continues with three recordings by the great Budapest String Quartet, from three different points in their career.  First is one of their early recordings, from the time when the Quartet's lineup still boasted two Hungarians, and three of its founding members.  These were first violinist Emil Hauser, violist István Ipolyi, and the Dutch cellist Harry Son; the newcomer was second violinist Josef Roisman, a Russian who would eventually become the quartet's leader:

Tchaikovsky: Quartet No. 2 in F, Op. 22 and
Dittersdorf: Quartet No. 6 in A - Minuet
Budapest String Quartet (Hauser-Roisman-Ipolyi-Son)
Recorded February 8, 9 and 11, 1929
HMV Album Series No. 134, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 121.83 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 48.98)

By the time of the following recording, Roisman had moved to the first violin chair, and only Ipolyi was left from the original lineup.  The Schneider brothers (Alexander and Mischa) now occupied the second violin and cello positions, respectively.  This lineup (1932-36) is considered by many to be the Budapest Quartet's greatest, and one of the few recordings from this period that has apparantly never been reissued on LP or CD is this, the only Haydn quartet that the Budapest Quartet was permitted to record for HMV after the Pro Arte Quartet was engaged to do its series for the Haydn Quartet Society.  (This particular work had, in fact, been part of the very first Society volume, but that was already out-of-print by the time this release appeared.)

Haydn: Quartet in G, Op. 54, No. 1
Budapest String Quartet (Roisman-Schneider-Ipolyi-Schneider)
Recorded April 24, 1935
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set DM-869, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 42.36 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 18.76)

Lastly, here is one of the Budapest Quartet's few recordings of a contemporary work, one actually written for them.  Even though Columbia had already successfully launched the LP format by the time of its issue, this recording was issued only on 78s, with the result that it is probably one of the Budapest Quartet's rarest recordings.  By this time, Boris Kroyt had long since replaced István Ipolyi as violist (so that now the group consisted entirely of Russians), and Alexander Schneider had left the Quartet in 1944 to freelance.  He returned in 1955, but in the meantime a succession of second violinists replaced him; at the time of this recording it was Edgar Ortenberg:

Hindemith: Quartet [old No. 5, new No. 6] in E-Flat
Budapest String Quartet (Roisman-Ortenberg-Kroyt-Schneider)
Recorded April 2, 1945
Columbia Masterworks Set MM-797, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 64.08 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 31.15 MB)

A word about the numbering of Hindemith's quartets, which is a very confusing issue indeed!  During his lifetime he published six: Op. 10, Op. 16, Op. 22, Op. 32, and two in E-Flat, one in 1943 and one in 1945 - Hindemith stopped using opus numbers after Opus 50.  (The present Columbia set doesn't identify a number, merely "Quartet in E-Flat (1943)", but the 1943 quartet was published as "No. 5.")  During the 1990s, however, an early Quartet, Op. 2, was published and added to the canon; this - unfortunately - became Quartet No. 1, and the numbers of all the succeeding quartets were bumped ahead by one!  Hence, the Op. 22, his most popular, is now known as "No. 4" where it previously was known as "No. 3"; worse still, the 1943 E-Flat is now "No. 6" - while formerly the 1945 quartet was known as "No. 6 in E-Flat"!  What I wonder is, why couldn't the Op. 2 quartet have been labelled "No. 0" as with Bruckner's early D minor symphony?

The Flonzaley Quartet and After

The Flonzaley Quartet

Today I present the legendary Flonzaley Quartet in the only complete 20th century quartet they recorded, the Dohnányi Op. 15.  This is one of their rarer recordings; in fact, I am unaware of any LP or CD transfer of this set, though most of the Flonzaleys' other early electrical sets were covered by Biddulph in a pair of double-CD packages during the 1990s.  Well, here it is, in a transfer I originally offered in 2008:

Dohnányi: Quartet No. 2 in D-Flat, Op. 15
The Flonzaley Quartet
Recorded October 20 and 21, 1927
HMV DB 1135 through 1137, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 69.3 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 26.74 MB)

The Flonzaley Quartet disbanded in 1929, but its members (which by this time were Adolfo Betti and Alfred Pochon, violins; Nicholas Moldavan, viola; and Iwan d'Archambeau, cello) continued to work in other quartets.  One of these was the Stradivarius String Quartet, in which Pochon and d'Archambeau were joined by Wolfe Wolfinsohn, first violin, and Marcel Dick, viola.  In 1937 the group made a handful of recordings for Columbia, of which perhaps the most important is this Mendelssohn quartet (again, originally offered in 2008):

Mendelssohn: Quartet No. 3 in D, Op. 44, No. 1
The Stradivarius String Quartet
Recorded January 27, February 4, April 19 and 22, 1937
Columbia Masterworks Set 304, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 59.77 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 24.47 MB)

Violist Moldavan went on to become a founding member (along with violinists William Kroll and Nicolai Berezowsky and cellist Jack Gottlieb) of the Coolidge Quartet, a very interesting group: named after that patron saint of 20th century chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (whose own String Quartet in E minor the group recorded); they started a project to record the complete Beethoven quartets, but abandoned it after No. 8 when the war and the Petrillo recording ban of 1942-44 intervened.  They also recorded quite a few American works, including quartets by Griffes, Loeffler, Mason, and by their own second violinist Berezowsky, as well as Roy Harris' piano quintet (with the composer's wife, Johana, at the piano).  Their first recording was of this Hindemith quartet (also a 2008 transfer):

Hindemith: Quartet No. 3, Op. 22
The Coolidge Quartet
Recorded May 20, 1938
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set M-524, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 48.93 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 25.77 MB)

Finally, for anyone interested, I have put up three videos on YouTube with my own harpsichord- and piano-playing; here are the links:

Maple Leaf Rag
Hovhaness: Dark River and Distant Bell
"Linus and Ludwig"