Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered

When, six years ago, Joshua Bell first set eyes on a score of Thomas de Hartmann’s 1943 Violin Concerto he felt he was discovering a rare and neglected masterpiece. In its klezmer-inflected themes, he found a profoundly moving response to the Nazi occupation of the composer’s homeland Ukraine—an expression of anguish at the fate of its Jewish citizens that was yet hauntingly beautiful. “I was shocked that something so compelling had been written that I’d never heard of before,” Bell says. “Somehow this piece had slipped through the cracks, and yet it is one of the great 20th-century pieces for violin and orchestra. I just had to get it out there.” With this in mind, Bell has teamed up with the Ukrainian INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Finnish Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska to perform and record de Hartmann’s Concerto. Taking place in Warsaw last year, amid the Russian war on Ukraine, the recording brought the players together at a time when they, too, were experiencing the fear and oppression that had inspired de Hartmann’s music. Warsaw was considered close enough, and safe enough, for Stasevska’s players to get to from Lviv, “but still there were a lot of logistical problems,” Bell explains. “They had to queue at the Polish border for nine hours the day before—it took a lot to make it happen.” But the fraught circumstances only seem to add to the passion heard here. From the outset, the deeply expressive qualities of de Hartmann’s Concerto are on display, beginning with brooding harmonies in the orchestra, out of which the solo violin rises with a melody filled with pathos. In many ways, Hartmann’s writing recalls the soundworld of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s war-scarred works, and fans of English wartime composer William Walton will appreciate the haunting play of light-and-darkness heard here. “But the Concerto is not derivative in any way,” Bell says. “There’s a lot of 20th-century music that sounds painful and dissonant, but I think that’s easy to do compared to writing something like this which shows the pain of war with such incredible beauty.” Another quality that attracts Bell to the Concerto is its concision. The piece is composed in four movements: the menacing motifs of the first-movement “Largo—Allegro” give way to a modally-inflected “Andante” theme and variations. A brief third movement, “Minuet fantasque”, evokes, as de Hartmann’s wife, Olga, once wrote, “a violinist wandering through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his macabre and sorrowful songs”, before a Stravinskian outburst kicks off the folk-inspired vibrant final movement. “The Concerto’s proportions are wonderful,” Bell says. “It’s got a beautiful slow movement. The ‘Minuet’ is cinematic, and takes you off on a journey before you get back to this intense last movement which has such an exciting ending. So it just delivers on every level; I find no weaknesses in it.” Certainly de Hartmann writes well for the violin, exploiting its range and register fully with virtuosic ideas that sit nicely under the fingers. The Concerto also presents plenty of interpretative challenges for the soloist. “As a performer, there are different characters in the music that one needs to pay attention to,” Bell explains. “Early on in the piece, there’s despair and darkness, and then in the first movement’s second theme there’s something a little bit more sweet and pleading, maybe one might say feminine. With each of these tunes, you have to get inside a different kind of sound, and with the solo violin, that means using vibrato and varying the sound to create different moods.” Born in 1884, de Hartmann learned his musical craft with the great Romantic Russian composers Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev before studying musical composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in pre-revolution St Petersburg. It was while living in Garches, in the western suburbs of Nazi-occupied Paris, that he wrote the Violin Concerto, secretly dedicating it to the Jewish composer Ernest Bloch. Asked whether the music speaks to the plight of the Ukrainian people today, Bell says it’s not making a political point. “There’s a feeling of war and marching, and I do think you can feel this in the Concerto,” he says. “But in the end it’s simply moving, beautiful music.”