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Five works to try after Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony
The images in Church Windows sprang from Respighi’s imagination
For more Hindemith from the same period, head for his Symphonic Dances. The offshoot of a collaboration with the choreographer Léonid Massine, the four-movement work begins with a strangely unsettling march and moves onto a frisky, yet still somehow nervy, scherzo, before rounding off in a confident, allguns-blazing finale. (BBC Philharmonic/ Yan Pascal Tortelier Chandos CHAN 9530).
While the work of Grünewald directly inspired Mathis der Maler, the images portrayed in Respighi’s 1925 Church Windows sprang from the Italian’s own imagination. Infused with Gregorian chant, as is the case with much of his music, the four movements – ‘The Flight into Egypt’, ‘St Michael Archangel’, ‘St Matins of St Clare’ and ‘St Gregory the Great’ – give a colourful, often dramatic, realisation of the pictures coursing through his mind. (Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra/joann Falletta Naxos 8.557711).
We have a driving holiday in Italy to thank for Martinů’s 1955 The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca – depicting The Legend of the True Cross, said frescoes can be found in the Tuscan city of Arezzo. Over three movements, Martinů lavishes all manner of orchestral colour in depicting visions experienced by the Queen of Sheba and Emperor Constantine, then two victories in battle by the latter. (Malmö So/james Depreist BIS BISCD501).
The younger brother of three artists, Hindemith’s contemporary Karl Amadeus Hartmann ummed and aahed between careers in music and the visual arts before finally opting for the former. His bigboned, two-movement Sixth Symphony is a reworking of his 1937 Symphony L’oeuvre, based on Zola’s 1885 novel about a doubt-ridden painter called Claude Lantier. (London Philharmonic Orchestra/leon Botstein Telarc 269262).
Finally, another German contemporary who, like Hindemith, doesn’t quite get the recognition he deserves: Wilhelm Petersen, whose cardinal sin was writing tonal, Romantic music in an era when it was going badly out of fashion. Recently recorded for the first time, Petersen’s Third Symphony reminds one initially of Mahler, though his soundworld is not a million miles away from, say, Vaughan Williams or Bax. (Frankfurt Radio SO/ Constantin Trinks Profil PH22069).