Hartmann Violn

Karl Amadeus Hartmann - Sinfonien - Gesangszene
(Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks - Rieger - Leitner - Kubelik - Macal)
EAC 099pb4 Rip | FLAC+CUE, LOGs | 4 CD | 224:50 min
973 MB | 300 dpi PDF Complete Scans
Genre: 20th Century - Contemporary | Label: Wergo

Hello buddies! I know many of you know about this set and how the modern recording by Metzmacher is maybe, more interesting than this one, but it contains some historical recordings by conductors who knew and met Hartmann and worked close to him, such as Rafael Kubelik, a great champion of his symphonies and stage music. Enjoy!

One of the most important German composers to emerge during the post-World War II era, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was born in the outskirts of Cologne in 1918. Zimmermann's music frequently borders on unplayability, and it is only through the exceptional gifts of a handful of players and conductors that his powerful musical creations escaped oblivion. On these CD's his violin concerto is presented together with works by Pfitzner and Hartmann.

This is an excellent Mahler Ninth. It does not feature the tortured anguish of Bernstein (Sony & DG), the elegant pain of Giulini (DG), or the stately gloom of Walter (Sony), but, like Libor Pesek (Virgin Classics), it successfully straddles more than a few fences. But "straddling fences" does not imply it's middle-of-the-road–it is, in fact, more middle-of-the-night. Dohnányi often makes inner voices turn disruptive, yet coaxes the strings to sound both sweet and eerie in their heavy use of portamento; and he is scrupulous in extracting just about every last meaningful detail in this monumental work.

This recording offers impassioned, clear, and intelligent presentations of two little-known but impressive pieces of earlier twentieth century music.

The music of the Ukrainian-born Thomas de Hartmann (1884–1956) is only now beginning to be rediscovered, almost seven decades after his death. The two works receiving their first recordings here reveal a major late-Romantic voice, downstream from Tchaikovsky, a student of Arensky and Taneyev, contemporary of Rachmaninov, and alert to the discoveries of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The Symphonie-Poème No. 1 – a musical cousin of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony – occupies a vast canvas and requires a correspondingly huge orchestra, generating a monumental sense of scale from essentially balletic material. The lighter Fantaisie-Concerto for double bass and orchestra moves from tangy dissonance via a tuneful slow movement to a perky, folk-inspired finale.

Over a decade before Richard Wagner's Valkyries took their celebrated ride, August Bournonville and Johann Peter Emilius Hartmanns Valkyrie danced on the Danish stage. Born in Copenhagen, son of French dancers, Bournonville founded the national Danish ballet with a series of ballets drawing its themes from Nordic mythology and early Danish history. For his first such project, Bournonville turned to his childhood friend Hartmann, who already had established himself as a composer of music on national themes.