Happy Birthday, Paul Hindemith!

Paul Hindemith, 1923

This is a recording that I had meant to upload last year for Hindemith's 120th birthday (he was born November 16, 1895), but I got rather busy and in the end, the only composer anniversary I celebrated last autumn was Sibelius' 150th. Well, what's a year between friends? And so, for Hindemith's 121st birthday on Wednesday, here is his fellow viola player, the incomparable William Primrose, in his first sonata for the instrument:

Hindemith: Sonata in F Major, Op. 11, No. 4
William Primrose, viola; Jesús Maria Sanromá, piano
Recorded November 18, 1938
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set M-547, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 38.48 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 26.42 MB)

Hindemith's Opus 11 consists of no less than six sonatas, all written in 1918-19, for various stringed instruments with and without piano.  The first two are violin sonatas with piano, the third a sonata for cello and piano, the fourth for viola and piano, the fifth for viola unaccompanied, and the sixth (unpublished during his lifetime) for violin unaccompanied. He was to add further examples of each combination to his oeuvre, the viola being particularly favored with three accompanied and four unaccompanied sonatas in total.

This is the first of three recordings pianist Sanromá would make of Hindemith's music for Victor during the late 1930s; in the spring of 1939 he would join the composer for recordings of a sonata for piano duet and of the third accompanied viola sonata.

Smetana by the Primrose Quartet

The Primrose Quartet

Today I present a great string quartet recording by an ensemble which was, alas, too short-lived: the Primrose Quartet, consisting of Oscar Shumsky and Josef Gingold, violins; William Primrose, viola, and Harvey Shapiro, cello.  All four were members of the NBC Symphony under Toscanini when the group was formed, at the invitation of NBC, in 1938, and America's entry into the Second World War caused the disbandment of the Quartet when Shumsky entered the U.S. Navy.  They left only three issued recordings: Haydn's "Seven Last Words" (the work's first recording in its string quartet version), Schumann's Piano Quintet with Jesús Maria Sanromá, and this one:

Smetana: Quartet No. 1 in E minor ("From My Life")
Primrose Quartet (Shumsky-Gingold-Primrose-Shapiro)
Recorded February 6 and 15, 1940
Victor Musical Masterpiece Set DM-675, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 65.83 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 37.15 MB)

This was the first-issued of the Primrose Quartet sets, and how fitting that it should have been of this work, with its opening theme on the viola, gloriously played by the ensemble's namesake!

The Primrose Quartet also recorded Brahms' Third Quartet and Mozart's K. 387, but these were not approved for issue.  The three issued recordings, plus the Brahms, were reissued by Biddulph about twenty years ago, but this is long out-of-print, and commands hefty prices when it does appear.

My friend and fellow record-collector, David Hoehl, who provided me with this Smetana set and with the Bloch Suite for Viola with Primrose that I uploaded earlier, calls my attention to this bit about Fritz Kitzinger, the accompanist on the Bloch Suite, as found in the fifth edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1958):

"Kitzinger, Fritz, pianist and conductor; b. Munich, Jan. 27, 1904; d. New York, May 23, 1947.  He studied at the Munich Cons. and the Univ. of Munich, graduating in 1924; conductor of the Dortmund Opera 1925-27), Berlin State Opera (1927-30), and Chemnitz Opera (1930); toured China and Japan as a symphonic conductor.  In 1934 he came to the U.S. and subsequently settled in N.Y."

The Incomparable William Primrose

Today I offer two early recordings by the great viola virtuoso, the Scottish-born William Primrose (1904-1982).  Originally trained as a violinist (a few of his violin records can be sampled at the CHARM website), about 1930 he switched to the viola, and the rest, as they say, is history.  By 1934 he had made his first solo recordings as a violist, and by the end of the decade (at which time he was playing in Toscanini's NBC Symphony) he had committed several major works for the instrument to disc, including these two:

Brahms: Sonata in E-Flat Major, Op. 120, No. 2
William Primrose, viola; Gerald Moore, piano
Recorded September 16, 1937
Victor Musical Masterpiece set M-422, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 47.32 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 22.24 MB)

Bloch: Suite for Viola and Piano (1919)
William Primrose, viola; Fritz Kitzinger, piano
Recorded April 22, 1938
Victor Musical Masterpiece set DM-575, four 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 83.96 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 39.12 MB)

Gerald Moore's achievements as an accompanist are well-known, but I can find out little about Fritz Kitzinger, who copes splendidly with the very demanding piano part in the Bloch Suite.  He seems to have been a vocal coach and conductor as well as a pianist; he married the noted piano pedagogue Adele Marcus in 1940.  On records he also appeared as an accompanist for Charles Kullman, Ezio Pinza, and Friedrich Schorr, but this is his only collaboration with William Primrose.