In the 1920s, Paul Hindemith was well and truly aboard the Modernist bandwagon, writing “shocking” absurdist operas employing bitonal harmony and even jazz. His violin sonatas, however, bypassed all this. His first two appeared in 1919 and 1920, predating his iconoclastic period, while the later sonatas date from 1935 and 1939, by which time he had left youthful hijinks behind.  Though Brahms would have found them mystifying, in the early works Hindemith breathes the same air as the older master. No 2 gets a strong performance from German violinist Tanja Becker-Bender and her Hungarian partner Péter Nagy. They are thoroughly inside the idiom, capturing the slightly lugubrious atmosphere of the slow movement. They also show fine rapport in the later C Major Sonata, when Becker-Benda lightens her tone for the fleeting scale passages at the close of the Langsam movement.Elsewhere they can turn abrasive – Hindemith’s music doesn’t need help to sound tough – and at forte Becker-Bender’s tone becomes wiry in the upper register.  Recent competition in Op 11 No 1 and the two later sonatas comes from Frank Peter Zimmermann on BIS. His tone is easier on the ear, and his musicianship (and that of his pianist Enrico…

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This is one of a number of new releases commemorating the 50th anniversary of Paul Hindemith’s death. His three Piano Sonatas were all written in the same year, 1936, after he’d fled the Nazis. (Hindemith wasn’t Jewish – the Nazis just hated his music.) The sonatas, while clearly from the same pen, have distinct profiles: the dramatic First has an improvisatory feel, the Second is lighter and the Third the most formally disciplined, with a Bach influence in its fugal finale. The booklet note states: “Hindemith… viewed the piano as providing a… neutral tone colouring through which the movement and intertwining of tones, themes and lines could be contemplated”. That may not be the whole story, but it seems to be how Markus Becker views this music. While far from being neutral in expression, his approach is thoughtful and balanced. Becker has a great many pluses: He brings coherence to the First Sonata, and the Third’s Sehr lebhaft movement positively flows (fluency in Hindemith – as opposed to, say, Chopin – does not come automatically. It requires hard work.) But for all his finesse there is one crucial aspect missing here: an underlying wildness that places Hindemith fairly and squarely…

When a jury comprising Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alexis Weissenberg, Nelson Freire and Joachim Kaiser announced Kazan- born, now Munich-based Anna Gourari the winner of the First International Clara Schumann Competition in 1994, apparently praising her “almost mystical playing”, she knew she had arrived. Nearly 20 years and nearly a dozen recordings later, it’s astonishing she isn’t better known internationally. Because she is that rare thing – not merely a pianist with a formidable technique; not merely a musician with a knack for clarifying the underlying musical structure as Michelangelo clarified the skeleton and musculature of the human body, but a true artist and poet. If there is one work on this recording capable of revealing the full range of Gourari’s technical, interpretative and yes, artistic gifts, it’s Busoni’s magisterial piano arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin. Quite simply, this is one of the finest interpretations of this work that I have ever heard – and my favourites include wonderful recordings by Arthur Rubinstein and Alicia de Laroccha. Despite Gourari’s having technique to burn, her playing is spacious, lyrical, profound, imbued with an almost Celibidache- like mysticism. Not that there is any lack of excitement in…

Despite the received wisdom that his music is dry and academic, much of the material is energetic and convivial – even witty. The viola was his instrument and he composed seven sonatas for it, in addition to these pieces. The two neo-classical works, Konzertmusik Op 48 and Kammermusik No 5, are 20th-century takes on Handel’s Concerti Grossi and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti respectively and feature masterful orchestration – especially in the superlative woodwind writing and bustling outer movements – while affording ample scope for the viola’s exquisitely soulful qualities. His only fully fledged concerto for the viola was Der Schwanendreher (“The Swan Turner”). This is based on old German folksongs, played by an iterant fiddler (the viola soloist), in an attempt to evoke the spirit of a more innocent age; understandable, considering Germany’s increasingly bleak political climate (Hindemith was resolutely anti-Nazi). This is the jewel in Hindemith’s crown; anyone who finds his music sterile should listen to the duet between viola  and harp and woodwind chorale in the introduction to the beautiful slow movement. The remaining work, Trauermusik (“Music for Mourning”) has a connection with Schwanandreher: when Hindemith was in London for the UK premiere, King George V died. Hindemith composed Trauermusik in…