Smiling Paul Hindemith rides again. The one-time bad boy of German expressionist music -- remember the second act of his Weimar opera Neues vom Tage that opens with the soprano singing an aria from her bathtub? -- turned all-round good guy for American conservative music -- remember his years at Yale teaching his students to mind their dissonances? -- may have fallen out of favor with the avant-garde and the rear guard alike, but at least in his photographs and his recordings, he's still smiling. In this two-disc EMI ...
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Smiling Paul Hindemith rides again. The one-time bad boy of German expressionist music -- remember the second act of his Weimar opera Neues vom Tage that opens with the soprano singing an aria from her bathtub? -- turned all-round good guy for American conservative music -- remember his years at Yale teaching his students to mind their dissonances? -- may have fallen out of favor with the avant-garde and the rear guard alike, but at least in his photographs and his recordings, he's still smiling. In this two-disc EMI collection of Hindemith conducting his own orchestral works adorned with a photograph of him on the cover, the composer proves a superb advocate for his own music. While most of the selections come from his later conservative period -- don't look here for his two most popular orchestral works: the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber and the symphony drawn from his opera Mathis der Maler -- the performances are uniformly first rate and wholly persuasive. With the Philharmonia...
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