Thomas de Hartmann Violin Concerto

[Christopher]

Hartmann's Violin Concerto has been recorded by Joshua Bell with the INSO-Lviv under Dalia Stasevska and reportedly this will be released in July. I haven't heard any excerpts of this piece (or of much of his other work) to be able to assess if Hartmann's music will fall within the remit of this forum.  de Hartmann's dates were 1884-1956.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/16/dalia-stasevska-joshua-bell-interview-ukraine-kyiv-russia

https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/music/dalia-stasevska-conductor-dalias-mixtape-bbc-so-ukraine-b1142142.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_de_Hartmann

[Alan Howe]

From the abovementioned Guardian article:

<<The violin concerto is by the virtually forgotten Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. The musicians of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv) are giving it its first commercial recording since the work's premiere in 1943. They will then perform it in a concert of Ukrainian and Polish music in Warsaw. The timing of this wartime resurrection has its own irony, since De Hartmann's klezmer-inflected score was deeply influenced by his distress at the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and especially by the fate of its Jewish citizens.

Bell is in love, ardently, with this new addition to his repertoire. "This is one of the great 20th-century works," he tells me. He dearly wants to perform it with Stasevska and the New York Philharmonic – perhaps, he muses, pairing it with the Barber concerto, which was premiered a couple of years earlier.

Bell says he loves the way the piece is proportioned, with its thrillingly demonic, concise finale preceded by an unusual, vignette-like movement that recalls "a violinist wandering through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his macabre and sorrowful songs", as De Hartmann's wife Olga once wrote. The work, with its vivid, almost visual sensibility and habit of "cutting" between musical scenes, is "cinematic", he says."He's managed to create something immediately accessible," Bell says of the piece. "It has beautiful tunes but it's also incredibly interesting: there are complex, unusual harmonies and it's full of surprises. You think you know where it's going but you don't – and that's something that's true of all great music.">>

[Christopher]

According to that Guardian article, the concert was livestreamed for premium subscribers on Medici TV and can be heard here: https://www.medici.tv/en/concerts/joshua-bell-dalia-stasevska-inso-lviv-symphony-orchestra-benefit-concert-ukraine-bacewicz-de-hartmann-skoryk-stankovych-chopin

[Alan Howe]

Thanks, Christopher.

Interestingly, it's in four movements:
1. Largo - Allegro
2. Andante religioso
3. Menuet fantasque
4. Finale - Vivace

By the way, there's a recording of the work on YouTube, but the audio is awful. All I gleaned from what little I could bear listening to was (a) that the work is in the composer's highly 'exotic' style and (b) that, despite being in four movements, it only takes around 18 minutes in performance.