Soundhound

The Amar Quartet, recorded links between composers and performers

 

  Photo above of the Amar Quartet on tour in Amsterdam 1924, meeting with Stravinsky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eviu5qU_NME Link to a recording of the Amar Quartet playing Hindemith String Quartet opus 22 (1926)

As seen with Ravel and the Galimir Quartet, the Amar Quartet's recording of Hindemith helps the listener to get a unique insight into Hindemith's mind as a composer ( he was himself violist of the group.)

Far from the dry, worthy image Hindemith's music sometimes suffers from, this recording has a lyrical, inventive and creative quality which demonstrates how far the gap can be between a composer's imagination and the written text.

The Amar Quartet was founded in 1921 at the Donaueschingen Chamber Music Festival. The Havemann Quartet was due to give the premiere of Hindemith's  3rd String Quartet opus 16 but they found it unplayable. A group had to be quickly put together to rehearse and perform the piece in 8 days, and the premiere was in the end a big success. The performers were Lico Amar first violin, Walter Caspar second violin, Hindemith himself as violist and his brother Rudolf Hindemith as cellist. This group of players became the Amar Quartet which became an important part of music life in the 20's, playing over 500 concerts. The group was untiringly committed to including contemporary music on their programmes.  As well as Hindemith's own works they performed works by Bartok, Krenek, Ravel, Webern, Casella, Stravinsky, Hába and Schönberg. They intentionally concentrated on rarely played works from the classical and romantic era so Beethoven and Haydn were not often included on their programmes. They undertook two big tours of the Soviet Union in 1927 and 1928, and Hindemith met with Shostakovitch and was able to hear some Russian contemporary music. Shostakovitch talks about this encounter ( not altogether brimming with praise for Hindemith's music!) in Testimony the book by Solomon Volkov.

Eventually fights broke out between Hindemith and his brother Rudof, so the cellist Maurits Franks became his replacement  ( reading about Rudolf's life  in and around the second world war in comparison to Paul's is quite a cautionary tale) The Quartet remained the same until Hindemith's departure in 1929 and the quartet finally disbanded in 1933

 

Musician Poets

 

 

 

 

                                         

Paul Celan -Todesfugue  

The poet reading his own poem:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVwLqEHDCQE

Somebody drew my attention to this recording today. You don't have to understand German, to apprecite this. You don't even have to understand the meaning of the words, you can just listen to the way Celan intones and times the rhythm of his speech. The stress, phrasing, repetition and slowing up, at the end of words he really wants us to remember is extraordinary. Musicians can learn a lot from poets. You also do not have to understand a language, to listen to it and hear it as if it is music.

Sometimes as English speakers we apologise for not knowing or understanding other languages, but I think the first step is just to listen for a while. Allowing your ear just to swim through the sounds and be ignorant.(hopefully temporarily!) Later on, you can find out what the words mean and try and understand their deeper  significance. Of course there are always English translations but how different it is to hear a poem spoken in it's original language by a great interpreter. Looking at it on the page does not have the same effect.

In the german language this poem is iconic and a national symbol. I cannot explain the deep resonances of this poem in a short blog post. And actually all I am trying to do, is encourage people to hear the music in language and the language in music. 

Many  artists and musicians have been inspired by this great poem. I will just name a few, in case you have not come across them.

Anselm Kiefer has  made a whole series of artworks inspired by Celan, below I have just put two of them,  named after the German and Jewish icons of the poem  Margarete (1981)  and Sulamith (1983) ( Sulamith comes from the Song of Songs)

 

Harrison Birtwistle has set the poem to music  in " Pulse Shadows", as has Hans- Jürgen von Bose and Samuel Adler to name but a few. Phrases from the poem have been used in punk rock songs (Slime) and even book titles ( a biography of the philosopher Martin Heidegger  who collaborated with the Nazis )

But for me it is the recording of Celan at the start of this post, that stops me in my tracks.