Hartmann Violn

The music of the Ukrainian-born Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) has been obscured by his association with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, but by the time they met in 1916, de Hartmann was already a hugely accomplished composer. The four works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, a student of Taneyev, contemporary of Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

The music of the Ukrainian-born Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) has been obscured by his association with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, but by the time they met in 1916, de Hartmann was already a hugely accomplished composer. The four works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, a student of Taneyev, contemporary of Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

It is quite incredible that the genre of the Symphonie lives on after Mahler. Mahler's Ninth Symphonie was a farewell to beauty,the Master Signifier and the images of childhood, the fragmented yet challenging experience of the metropolis. The transgression of beauty was to cloud over Europe in ways Mahler's imagination could hardly fathom. With Hartmann the Symphonie lives in a exiled world, it is not one free to speak, it is one where the voice, (as Agamben says someplace) carries Being, yet in what form? It is a voice smashed from the SS jackboots, a voice of the dispossessed and the homeless.

A CD of the Bamberger Symphoniker, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, was recently released, featuring works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963) and Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975). The pairing of these works will not be a coincidence, because both composers were not only friends, but they also shared a number of characteristics, such as the proclamation of humane ideals and the pursuit of expressiveness. Perhaps their only point of contention was the twelve-tone technique, which Hartmann didn't like, while Dallapiccola was intensively involved with it.

August Winding was the son of a musical clergyman whose great interest was in collecting folk-songs. He was his son's first music teacher. Later, he studied in Hamburg, Vienna and Paris where he became acquainted with Chopin and Kalkbrenner. The composer Carl Reinecke, who was court composer in Copenhagen in 1846-48, also taught Winding. He was very close to Niels W. Gade and also studied with him. He established himself as a formidable pianist especially in the works of Mozart and Beethoven. He taught at the Conservatory in Copenhagen and through his marriage to Clara, the daughter of J.P.E. Hartmann, he became a member of this musical family. In fact, the other composer on this CD, Emil Hartmann was his brother-in-law.

Botstein clearly feels great conviction for this music and this comes across both in performance and in the booklet text, part of which he contributed. These are eloquent performances directed by a man who clearly sees Hartmann as a natural partner to Shostakovich.

The first commercial gramophone recording of a German symphony after World War II was that of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Foutrh Symphony for string orchestra under the derection of Franz André. More than fourty years later, this work once agains opens a complete studio recording of Hartmann's symphonie, now under Ingo Metzmacher.

This disc combines Hartmann's Symphony No. 1 (1937/1948), a requiem for the victims of the Nazis and the dead of World War II, using Walt Whitman's verses from "Leaves of Grass" written for the dead of the Civil War and a soprano singer, with anti-war pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, Bouslav Martinu, and Luigi Nono.