Rachmaninow & Hindemith

Few conductors have been so closely linked with the Tonkunstler Orchestra for so long as Hans Graf. Since his debut in 1980, the Austrian who’s celebrated from the USA to East Asia has over and over again been a welcome collaborator. This is just the kind of return to the beloved homeland that Sergei Rachmaninov was denied in his own time, after leaving Russia during the 1917 revolution. In exile in the USA he suffered painfully under this separation, but also turned his sorrow into music – for example in his large-format Third, a symphony that swooshes with late-Romantic melody without disavowing its classicist roots. It forms a moving contrast with the only completed movement of Rachmaninov’s Youth Symphony, which he had written 44 years previously as a student and which, like the whole programme, is placed here at the heartfelt request of Hans Graf. A work only a few years younger than Rachmaninov’s Third is the 1939 Violin Concerto by Paul Hindemith – who was another emigré against his will, after the Nazis branded him a «cultural Bolshevik». Born in 1999, the Austrian-Chinese violinist Ziyu He makes his Tonkunstler debut with this gripping work in which yearning, virtuosity and greatness are combined.