Hindemith’s Violin Concerto is one of his finest works in concerto form. It has attracted the talents of violinists from Isaac Stern to David Oistrakh, and yet it’s still very seldom performed and recorded. This is a pity, because there really aren’t that many great violin concertos around and there’s a superabundance of terrible ones, some of which are quite popular. As part of his ongoing Hindemith orchestral music series, conductor Werner Andreas Albert returns to Australia in the company of Aussie violinist Dene Olding, who plays this music with both technical accuracy and a thoroughly idiomatic, Romantic emotional warmth. He’s equally brilliant in the spiky Kammermusik 4, in which the composer sets the soloist against an eccentric ensemble of winds, drums, and lower strings. Tuttifänchen is a charming suite drawn from music Hindemith composed in 1922 for a Christmas fairy-tale. The piece includes a few clunky jazz parodies, and is affectionate good fun. A fine installment in an excellent and important ongoing series.
