Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann anyone?

[Jonathan]

Hi All,
I was awake at 4.30am this morning and put the radio on.  It was Through the Night on BBC Radio 3 and there was a lovely piece being played by the above composer.  I've just had a look around on iTunes, Amazon and MDT and there are about a dozen CDs of his music available - however, not all are single composer discs.  I just wondered if anyone here have any of these CDs in their collections and would they like to comment on the music?

[Alan Howe]

I thoroughly recommend his two symphonies on Dacapo: No.2 is a masterpiece. There is also a very good CD of overtures on the same label.

[TerraEpon]

One cannot forget The Valkyrie -- it's on CPO I think. It's a great entry into the 19th Century ballet canon as it were...

I have the symphonies disc, and enjoy it very much. There's also an (unfortunetly OOP) piano disc that's very good as well.

[Mark Thomas]

JPE is a greatly underrated composer IMHO. I agree that the Second Symphony is  a really fine work, but so are every one of the overtures of his which I've heard. The Valkyrie ballet is a very strong work too, as is his opera Liden Kirsten. Even the Piano Sonatas plumb real depths and reward repeated hearing. Had he been writing in Germany and not the musical backwater of Denmark (with all due apologies to any Danish readers) I'm sure that he would have secured a reputation as a major composer. His son Emil, although not really in the same league, also wrote some enjoyable works - we could do with recordings of the three symphonies.

[Alan Howe]

Please excuse the resurrection of this thread, but I've just been listening to J.P.E.'s magnificent 2nd Symphony and I have absolutely no doubt that it is a masterpiece of the first order, with bold themes, great brass writing and magnificent dynamism throughout. Does anyone else know it (there's a wonderful Dacapo CD, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard)?

[semloh]

...scurries to CPO set ..... 

[scottevan]

One cannot forget The Valkyrie -- it's on CPO I think. It's a great entry into the 19th Century ballet canon as it were...

To that I would add "From Tale to Tale," Hartmann's collaboration with son-in-law Niels Gade.  It's included in the massive CD set Music to the Bournonville Ballets.   

The overture to "Yrsa" was the first work of Hartmann's I came across; he's been one of my favorite unsungs since.

[Ilja]

Johan Hartmann (wonder where that quaint custom of always mentioning him with all three christian names comes from - mimicking the Bachs?) is one of my regular refuges when people confront me with the "but unknown composers are just not as good as the canon" argument (others include Schmidt, Berwald, Martucci, Atterberg and Raff).


I don't think the 1st symphony is that much inferior to the 2nd, by the way.

[Alan Howe]

It's not a quaint custom, Ilja, but a necessity: Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann was the grandson of another composer, Johann Ernst Hartmann (1726-1793), hence the need for easy identification - J.P.E., not J.E!

I remember my confusion on noting that cpo had released four symphonies by Johann Ernst, only to discover that this was the 18th-century Hartmann!

J.P.E.'s son was, of course, Emil Hartmann.

[TerraEpon]

There's a very nice disc of Emil's music on DeCapo. But I certainly prefer the father.

[Ilja]

Not sure there. Johan probably is the more naturally gifted of the two, but he's not particularly adventurous. Emil, on the other hand, seems to be a bit broader in musical and literary orientation. It's also that the idiom suits me better, but I generally he sometimes gets unfairly short-shifted in the comparison with Hartmann père.

[Alan Howe]

I've not yet heard anything by Emil that's really grabbed me in the same way that J.P.E's music has. All very personal, I know...