Nothing to Heckel at here

Paul Hindemith loved writing pieces for performers of unusual instruments, helping them to build a repertoire. I've written before about his piece for trautonium, but there's also a piece featuring the heckelphone - a woodwind instrument close to the oboe family but operating in a lower register and sometimes sounding a bit clarinet-ish. The Trio for Heckelphone, Viola and Piano, Op.47 of 1928 is such a personable work (and gets better with each hearing), so it's worth listening to for reasons over than mere curiosity. 

The composer delays introducing the heckelphone, beginning the first of the Trio's two movements with a substantial piano solo, labelled by the composer as a Recitative but really a playfully contrapuntal piece of writing. The heckelphone appears, along with the viola, as we enter the lovely Arioso, where it sings an expressive melody notable for its plunging sevenths to the accompaniment of the piano. The latter introduces the section's attractive second subject with its pleasing chromatic touches. The viola joins the heckelphone for the movement's closing Duet - a fast, fun passage with some of the abandon of Ives's violin sonatas. 

Hindemith calls his second movement a Potpourri - as, indeed, it is. Its first section gives us a jaunty tune over a perpetual accompaniment, with heckelphone, viola and piano weaving the tune around each other in exuberant counterpoint. Hindemith plays this delightful game for some time, changing its textures, before the music becomes swiftly fugal. The piano then leads us into pastures new, where the strictness of contrapuntal writing gives way to the freedom of toccata-style writing. and the others follow cheerfully before everything ends with a brilliant coda. 

Typically, despite the dissonances and the harmonic daringness, the composer's music still manages to sound diatonic. It is far from atonality.

Please try and see what you think.

Where Hindemith led...?

What is it with Hindemith? His Fourth String Quartet, Op.22 is a first-rate piece, at times beautiful, moving, bracing, brilliant, scary and fun. Though composed in 1921, it sometimes sounds strikingly like the Shostakovich of the fifteen quartets. As Shostakovich has been the New Mahler for the last decade or so, perhaps Hindemith could soon become the New Shostakovich and sweep the airwaves and concert halls of the world? Probably not (though fingers crossed).

The first violin opens the quartet with a satisfying melodic line, melancholic in character. This is the opening gambit in an anxious, lyrical fugato into which Hindemith's early Expressionism soon intrudes, forcing the fugato aside. It returns, however, over a treading bass before singing to itself in a sad duet. This is bleak but beautiful music, not wholly remote from the elegiac side of his contemporary, Bartok - or of Shostakovich.

Assertive chords signal a shift to fast stamping music - a savage scherzo, scurrying and slashing, with a whirling sense of melody. For the trio section, the texture thinks to a violin's nervous melody dancing neurotically over a quickly-rocking accompaniment. Others join in. This splendid music grows ever more compelling. Eventually things slow down and melt into shadows, but the whirling melody awaits, cranks itself up and spins off again. A brief elegiac pause for thought leads to a final frenzy. 

The central movement is a muted affair - literally! - with whispered melody sounding over a muffled pizzicato accompaniment. The music is vaguely march-like in character. The melody (which winds its way through the voices) is winning, with a captivating and wholly individual lyricism. A very fine movement.

The fourth movement storms in. The mutes are off! It's another savage, whirling scherzo - exhilarating and brilliant. This is paprika-rich stuff. We then pass briefly through a contrapuntal passage, entering the world of the neo-Classical Hindemith to come, taking us straight through into the thoroughly enjoyable rondo finale - a lively, folk-flavoured movement whose anticipation of the later Shostakovich is truly uncanny.

Moving forwards some 25 years and we arrive at Shostakovich himself and his Third String Quartet in F minor. Composed in the immediate aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, this dark quartet follows in several of Hindemith's footprints.

The first movement Allegretto opens with a jaunty air - its theme a typically wayward Shostakovich tune over a very simple accompaniment. The neo-Classical style comes with a whiff of satire but with the secondary material darker thoughts arrive and in the development section's dour (but exciting) counterpoint nerves might be set jangling - they certainly should be by the scream of dissonance at its climax from which the recapitulation springs. The coda is a hurtle to the end, with a cock-snooking conclusion.

The second movement Moderato deepens the darkness with one of Shostakovich's machine-like accompaniments underlying a flighty fiddle tune, making it into a dead-eyed waltz. This danse macabre continues with new tunes and new accompaniments but the tone is maintained. Listen out for the strange pizzicato passage (which thirds clenching their teeth above them). Weirdly compelling, it finally yields way to tragic utterance.

With the third movement Allegro we are in the familiar world of the savage scherzo. Shostakovich's opening chords bark like prison guard-dogs and their rhythms underpin the first of the movement's Russian-sounding tunes (along with faster ones). Its trio section doesn't depart from the pattern - or the mood, with teeters between menace and hysteria.

The Adagio is (of course! - as this is Shostakovich!) elegiac and (also of course!) bleakly beautiful. Unison passages of grim intent begin by alternating with individual lamenting voices. The melodies of each penetrate each other and a funeral march begins, using them poignantly. Shostakovich's melodic writing is especially strong here.

The long Finale begins veiled in mystery but soon engages us with an enigmatically smiling violin melody. A second follows. Again the accompaniments are kept fresh. The next such tune belongs to the cello and has something of the circus about it (a clown's painted-on smile?). It becomes a duet and is disquietingly charming. After all this melody-driven writing comes some development and a tensing of the nerve-strings. A scary climax arrives and is prolonged, with the opening theme from the Adagio returning at the point of greatest stress, its companion following. The movement ebbs into the lament of a single voice and then silence. Quietly the Finale's own themes return in a muted recapitulation before themselves ebbing onto a single voice's enigmatic, ethereal last song. 

Though the magnificent Shostakovich quartet is more Romantically expressive than the no-less-magnificent Hindemith quartet, it seems to me to be in a clear line of descent from it. Does it to you?

Trautonium fever

It's time for me to finally mount a hobby-horse of mine that I've intended to ride since the start of this blog. I love the music of Paul Hindemith. Before getting into my full stride in future posts, I want to recommend a rarity by the composer in the hope that it will win you over to him straight away.

That piece is his Concertino for Trautonium and Strings. 

Part of the reason for its rarity (even by the standards of the much-neglected Hindemith) is that trautoniums are not easy to come by and few learn to play them - especially to the standard demanded by concert works like this. You may never even have heard of them. Before hearing this piece, neither had I. The trautonium is an electronic instrument that was created around 1929 but never really caught on in a big way. There were several such instruments born around that time, the best known of which are the ondes martenot (as famously used in Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony) and the theremin. Like the ondes martenot and the theremin, the trautonium can sound unearthly and disembodied, which makes it - and the others - natural choices for film composers seeking to conjure up an eerie atmosphere. The theremin has sent shivers up the spine in Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still and (on TV) Midsomer Murders, while the ondes martenot has spooked the viewers of Ghostbusters, among many other films. The trautonium's most famous outing was in Hitchcock's The Birds (sadly no link for this one, but a picture above to compensate).  

In Hindemith's Concertino the trautonium sounds at different times like various conventional instruments, usually the clarinet, but at others is as electronic-sounding as can be. It is a chameleon that continually changes colour. 

The work's opening movement begins with its strange star playing the role of a lyric tenor against a gentle string accompaniment. He sings a characteristic Hindemith melody. (Hindemith is a great tunesmith. His tunes are highly individual though and often go off at unusual tangents.) The pace soon quickens abruptly and neo-Classical good humour enters with another fine melody, with other good tunes to follow - including one whose vaguely jazzy character reminds me of the sort of themes you get in Shostakovich's lighter works. (The influence of Hindemith on Shostakovich is underestimated. The more you know of Hindemith's music - especially the early music - and the more you see that certain aspects of the Shostakovich style which we think of as being 'pure Shostakovich' must have been learned from the then-highly-well-known German master.) Nothing is recapitulated, so on we go into the slow movement - a lyric gem, full of beauty, that involves the strings as much as the soloist in the singing of the song. The central episode worries about things a bit but beauty remains and Hindemith-style serenity soon flows back in. The finale then returns to neo-Classical high spirits and brings more good tunes - some jaunty, some lyrical.

An engaging piece then, full of memorable themes and fine craftsmanship, which grows ever more delightful the more familiar you become with it. This Concertino encapsulates why I love Hindemith's music. Of course, there are other sides to his music that need exploring too - but the memorable themes and fine craftsmanship are a constant.