I'm glad to see that Hindemith has champions on this forum.  I've
always thought Hindemith to be a much better, deeply musical and even
communicative composer than his caricature often suggests.  His was some
of the first serious 20th-century music I ever played, thanks to the
instrumental sonatas, which I often accompanied as a teen.  (A local
trumpet teacher, who had once been principal in the Pittsburgh SO under
Fritz Reiner, taught the Trumpet Sonata so often that I had the piano part
memorized.  I haven't played it in 25 years.) Hindemith's craft is enormous
and unmistakeable, extending to the tremendous care and precision with
which he notates details of dynamic, articulation and phrasing.  Every
marking means something, and contributes to the overall effect.  (This
attention to notational detail is not dissimilar to what one finds in
Debussy, Ravel, or even Vincent Persichetti, just to name three rather
disparate examples.) For this very reason, I can't get quite as excited
over Glenn Gould's Hindemith interpretations as do others.  As always in
Gould, one learns a great deal about the extraordinary, provocative and
always vital musical mind of the pianist, which love or hate the results
can't be completely dismissed or ignored.  One doesn't learn quite so much
about Hindemith's own musical personality.  Instead of being itself, it
becomes a 20th-century extension of Gould's Bachian persona.  While there's
some truth there, it's by no means the whole truth, and in that sense
Hindemith is somewhat ill-served.  Given his ill-deserved reputation
for dryness, he deserves more performers who take him at his own
well-considered word.  I'm looking forward to exploring him further this
year as I learn the Clarinet Quartet for a March performance in Chicago.
I hope we'll do him something like justice.

DPHorn, wondering what Gould would have done with Busoni's "Fantasia
contrappuntistica."