Customer Reviews

Paul Hindemith: Music For Viola, Volume 3

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I loved this recording from the very first time I heard it. Cortese's tone has a huge range- it can be sweet, delicate, rich, vibrant, and sometimes aggressive. Besides playing the viola beautifully, he interprets these sonatas so skillfully that the mood created by the music far overshadows the music itself (which is, by the way, quite gorgeous). It is a lyrical, intense performance.

This volume completes violist Paul Cortese's recordings of Paul Hindemith's solo works for viola. As far as I know, no violist has ever accomplished this before, and if another ever does I doubt that the performances would be as good as on these recordings. I have the whole set of three CDs and I highly recommend them all.

This CD has the Trauermusik (Funeral Music), the Meditation for viola and piano, and the sonatas for viola and piano. Cortese's technical ability is stunning, as is his musicality, but the CD is worth the price even for the accompanist's performance alone. Jordi Vilaprinyo puts in an amazingly accurate, fluid, and musical performance of these works. As any pianist knows, Hindemith's piano accompaniments are often more difficult than the soloist's part, to the extent that many accompanists have a 'no Hindemith' policy!

Volume 3 has a colorful variety of works, running chronologically from Hindemith's 1919 Sonata in F to the 1939 Viola Sonata.