Naxos trumpets this new recording (actually set down in 2011) of the complete score for Hindemith’s ballet Nobilissima Visione (1938) as the ‘first’ but it isn’t. Karl Anton Rickenbacher and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra got there 18 years earlier, in 1993 for Koch, released – coupled with the Suite of French Dances – to mark the composer’s centenary two years later.

Rickenbacher’s remains a fine and committed account; however, Gerard Schwarz’s is its equal. Naxos’s sound is a notch finer than the Koch of two decades ago but what appeals here is that Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony play it as a theatre score, so the familiar episodes from the concert suite – which occur in a different sequence in the ballet – sound quite different played by a smaller band in context. Yamamoto renders the various trombone solos very nicely indeed and overall one is surprised by how much superb invention is in the music Hindemith left out of the suite. The concluding passacaglia, ‘Incipiunt laudes creaturarum’, retains its nobility of utterance with undiminished impact.

Time was the Five Pieces for strings (1927), part of Hindemith’s collection Schülwerk fur Instrumente-Zusammenspiel (‘Educational music for instrumental ensembles’) was fairly ubiquitous in concert and on disc – usually Karl Münchinger’s with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (8/57) – so Schwarz’s new recording is most welcome. There have been others but the Seattle players’ delivery of the set of Langsam – Langsam – Lebhaft – Sehr langsam – Lebhaft is atmospheric beyond its educational purpose. But then Hindemith was a composer first, teacher second.