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."