The Lustige Sinfonietta (''Merry Sinfonietta'') was one of the pieces in which the 21-year-old Hindemith (until then making the beginnings of a fine career as a string player) discovered his vocation as a composer. When he wrote it, in 1916, he was almost the only male member of his family who had not yet been called up for military service, and news arrived almost daily of casualties among his relations; his father's death at the front was reported just as Hindemith began the Sinfonietta. ''The war is so sad'', he wrote, ''that it would be a good thing, and would help us to get over so much, if one could oppose this whole period with the music-hall of humour.'' As spoken epigraphs to each section he chose texts by Christian Morgenstern (a German Edward Lear, but with touches both of gallows humour and of proto-surrealism), and dedicated the work to the poet's memory: ''I am crazy about him, perhaps because he is as mad as I am, or vice-versa''.
Morgenstern is the key to the work's ambiguous merriment. Its ambiguity lies in its juxtapositions, which are disconcertingly detached, as though the composer were coolly studying our reactions as he undercuts serious, even Brahmsian counterpoint with music of mocking joviality. There is an ambiguous conflict, too, between means and ends: a lyrical idea deliberately inflated to an overblown climax that destroys the theme's eloquence, almost minimalist material ironically subjected to learnedly resourceful development, reassuring formal structures implied but then denied. And yet beneath the music's sarcasm there is more than a hint of Morgenstern's geniality, and a good deal of his delight in ingeniously inconsequent invention. It is a bizarre and disorderly piece but a brilliantly fertile and entertaining one, in which Brahms and Kurt Weill (at this date a 16 year-old schoolboy) seem to co-exist to their mutual astonishment, and in which much of Hindemith's development over the next decade is already sketched with great confidence.
On completing the Sinfonietta he thought it ''a masterpiece, but from the very beginning I never believed that anyone would take any notice of it''. He paid curiously little heed to it himself, in fact, including it perhaps among the ''pieces I don't like any more'' referred to in a brief autobiographical note written five years later. As he grew older the list of 'pieces he didn't like any more' grew longer, and the Sinfonietta was not published or performed (by the artists who made this recording) until 1980, long after Hindemith's death. The ''well-tempered Rag Time'' of 1921 was also deemed unworthy of a place in Hindemith's official catalogue, and had to wait for its first performance until a few days before this recording was made. It is not much more than a squib, a disrespectful jeu d'esprit which crowns the fullbottomed wig of Bach's C minor Fugue (from Book 1 of the 48) with a rakish boater.
It is a thousand pities that Wergo/Impetus have not seen fit to print the texts of Morgenstern's poems in the accompanying booklet, in the original or in English. In all other respects this is a praiseworthy continuation of Gerd Albrecht's survey of the young Hindemith which his older self took such misguided pains to conceal. The performances are vividly pungent and the recordings (an unnaturally close focus on the speaker apart: he was obviously not in the same studio as the orchestra) are very clean.'