At a guess, the only listeners really conversant with Paul Hindemith nowadays are also fans of the New York City Ballet. That’s thanks to The Four Temperaments (1946)—a score Hindemith started for the choreographer Léonide Massine but never finished. Hindemith completed it when George Balanchine asked him for a work he could play on the piano for his own enjoyment. Balanchine then choreographed the composition (in its orchestral version) as his first work for Ballet Society, the forerunner of the great troupe that has endured, with The Four Temperaments a cornerstone of the repertory. You’ll recognize its bristling Baroque-inspired, Machine Age vigor when you hear the composer’s early opera Cardillac, which premiered exactly 100 years ago in Frankfurt. It’s another “Tale of Hoffmann” (the iconic German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann, that is), but nothing like the ones immortalized in music by Jacques Offenbach. Cardillac—the only named character in a cast otherwise consisting of the Officer, the Lady, etc.—is the star goldsmith of Paris in the Age of the Sun King. If only his clients didn’t have a way of getting murdered! What can I tell you? Not unlike Sweeney Todd, the guy loves his work. Fabio Luisi, who conducts Zurich’s centennial revival, has the steady hand on the wheel this high-risk score requires; the director is Kornél Mundruczó, prolific in film as well as in live theater, known for bold flourishes of the surreal. Gábor Bretz, a dark, handsome bass-baritone of brooding intensity, assumes the title role. —Matthew Gurewitsch