Hindemith: String Quartets Vol 1

Amar QuartetNaxos 8.572163 *****

Will the real Paul Hindemith please stand up? If you only know the composer's later works you may well be taken aback by the sometimes almost puppyish eagerness of his Quartet in F minor, Op. 10, written as a soldier in 1918. Perhaps the high spirits helped keep his mind away from the war he was fighting – it was only by a "miracle", he said, that on one occasion he survived a grenade attack. The same kind of animation, although in a rather chewier musical idiom, characterises the outer movements of the Quartet in C, Op 16, which frame a slow movement of probing expressiveness. The technical difficulty of the music forced Hindemith, himself a gifted player, to form a new ensemble, the Amar Quartet, to give the premiere in 1921. The Amar Quartet recorded here were awarded the name by the Hindemith Institute in 1995, on the centenary of the composer's birth. url.ie/af6o