NEWThe World’s ON Leading ClassicalNAXOS Music Label JULY 2014 © Steve Sherman This Month’s Other Highlights © 2014 Naxos Rights US, Inc. • Contact Us:
[email protected] www.naxos.com • www.classicsonline.com • www.naxosmusiclibrary.com • blog.naxos.com NEW ON NAXOS | JULY 2014 8.572763 Playing Time: 58:37 7 47313 27637 0 Paul HINDEMITH (1895–1963) Nobilissima Visione (Complete Ballet) Five Pieces for String Orchestra, Op. 44, No. 4 Seattle Symphony Orchestra • Gerard Schwarz A series of powerful, largely radical works in the early 1920s saw Hindemith established as Germany’s leading young composer. In 1936 he was asked by choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine to collaborate on a ballet project and Hindemith proposed scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi. The resulting ballet, Nobilissima Visione (The Noblest Vision), is a work of lyricism, elegy and majesty. This is the first recording of the complete ballet score, not the three-movement concert suite that Hindemith later extracted. The Five Pieces for String Orchestra is an earlier, spirited work dating from 1927. Gerard Schwarz © Ben Vanhouten Sales Points: Most recordings of Hindemith’s attractive, moving, and majestic score for the ballet Nobilissima Visione (The Noblest Vision), are of the three-movement concert suite he extracted from it for performance and which lasts only about 20-minutes. This is invariably coupled with The Four Temperaments (as by DePriest on Delos), or the Symphony in E flat (Tortelier/EMI), or with Mathis der Maler, as on Naxos’ own 1995 disc [8.553078] with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Franz Paul Decker.