Hindemith: Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano – With Alexander Fiterstein, Sean Lee, Nicholas Canellakis and Michael Brown

Paul Hindemith’s quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano is a major work of imposing scale, and it receives a magnificent performance in this program of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Also celebrated during his lifetime for his virtuosic viola-playing, as a composer Paul Hindemith was a “revolutionary of the 20th-century musical world” (Emmanuel Loubet). Unusual among his contemporaries for his fascination with contrapuntal technique (with models like Bach and Handel), the passionate music theorist nonetheless described in his treatise the need for an expanded tonality that surpassed major-minor harmonic structures to find a new foundation in a hierarchic order of intervals. Composed in 1938 as he was emigrating from Germany under the growing storm of Nazism, Hindemith’s quartet performed here perfectly mirrors his dual ambitions of combining Baroque-inspired contrapuntalism with neoclassicism and other more modern compositional techniques.