Recorded for the first time on one album, this release features Hindemith’s complete works for violin and piano and the rarely recorded “Kleine Sonata” for Viola D’amore and piano. Hindemith’s reputation as a master composer, viola virtuoso and dominant pedagogue — who, being able to play practically every standard instrument (and a few non-standard ones), expected the same from his students — has tended to obscure the fact that he first came to attention not as a composer or violist but as a violinist. Roman Mints has had a lifelong love of the works of Paul Hindemith, which began when he was a young violinist, studying in Moscow in the 1980s. He says “This music, written not just before I was born but closer to the time of my grandparents’ birth, felt completely contemporary, and daringly advanced in its sound — and not just to me, as it turns out: 30 years on, Hindemith is still regarded by concert programmers as too difficult for the wider public. I put Sonata in D on the stand. I was gripped by the first subject, constructed from seconds and sevenths, marked to be played ‘with stony defiance.’ I was never the same again and he became my window into contemporary music.”

Roman Mints (violin)
Alexander Kobrin (piano)