An integral survey of the Hindemith quartets is long overdue, and now two have appeared (the second still in progress), but with conflicting numbering conventions. The covers of both releases above claim to contain Quartets Nos. 3 and 5: on closer inspection – the opus numbers give it away – one finds that the Juilliard on Wergo are playing Opp. 16 and 32 – Nos. 2 and 4 to the Kocian (the former featured – with the First and Sixth – on an earlier release on Praga). With Hindemith’s last two quartets both being in E flat without opus numbers, identification will need a modicum of care. A word or two, then, needs to be said first, hopefully to obviate confusion. Hindemith wrote eight works entitled ‘String Quartet’, the first a juvenile piece long since lost, from before the First World War, the second in C major dating from 1915 and which the composer listed officially as Op. 2. Neither were numbered in his lifetime and he resisted all inducements to have Op. 2 – which had won a prestigious prize from the Mendelssohn Foundation – published. When Hindemith returned to the quartet medium in 1919 the resulting F minor piece was designated and remained No. 1. Recently, Op. 2 has been programmed misleadingly as the ‘First’ but Praga, rightly I feel, have resisted that trend (even if they term it “No. 0”); and one need only look to the quartet output of Bartok and Schoenberg for examples of ‘pre-First’ Quartets.
Hindemith’s quartet output is distributed very unevenly through his career; he composed all but the final two works (1943 and 1945 respectively) by the end of 1923. Therefore they do not form a chain of developmental milestones in the way that those of Bartok, Martinu or Schoenberg do. This might account for their relative neglect collectively, although No. 3 (1921) has maintained a regular presence in the catalogue. The Czech Kocian Quartet play them all with great understanding, and their account of the Third will stand comparison with any – even the remarkable, if now murky sounding, version by Hindemith’s own Amar Quartet in 1927. Competition is stiff also in the Fourth (1923), recorded – as No. 5 – by the Sonare Quartet in the first release of an apparently abandoned cycle. Fluent as the Sonare were, the Kocian seem more au fait with Hindemith’s style (as they are throughout), playing with far greater knowledge and sympathy. These qualities also compensate for any technical inferiority when compared with the renowned Juilliards: the Americans cannot quite match the enthusiasm and drive of their Czech rivals (also true in No. 2 from 1920). And I prefer, marginally, Praga’s sound to that of Wergo; the latter lacks depth, though the former does make the violins sound unnaturally shrill in the upper registers.
I suspect that the Kocian may be outstripped by the Juilliard in the more conventional wartime Quartets (Nos. 5 and 6), not least because they relish Hindemith’s expressionist high spirits so much. Nowhere is this heard to better effect than in the subversive send-ups of military band music in Minimax, and spa orchestras in the evocation of a sight-reading of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Overture. Their accounts of both are preferable to the by no means inadequate versions by the Buchberger Quartet, which were coupled with the 1923 Clarinet Quintet. I hope that the Juilliard and Kocian will give us the pieces for quartet and other instruments, such as that Quintet and the song-cycles Melancholie (1918) and Die Junge Magd (1922).'