Hindemith's three piano sonatas date from 1936, when the composer was under pressure from the Nazis over his opera Mathis der Maler. Malcolm MacDonald's notes suggest that Hindemith saw the piano as "the ideal medium for meditation in troubled times, and the vehicle for a more philosophical probing into the nature of music itself". Unlike the composer's long list of sonatas for other instruments, few great names have taken up his piano sonatas, although Sviatoslav Richter and Glenn Gould are among their number. Becker ameliorates the potential for dryness which have made these works easy to admire but harder to love, and he includes the original slow movement of the First Sonata, as well as the slow march that Hindemith supplied its first performer, Walter Gieseking, as a replacement. url.ie/4qdb