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.
Karl Amadeus Hartmanns work is very difficult to attribute to any particular compositional school. Although he was not a revolutionist in terms of notation or performance forces, he was able to creatively subordinate all the achievements of modern musical language to innovative formal approaches. Hartmann wrote with extraordinary verve, creating artistic phrases with a broad ambitus, at the same time he could masterfully juggle short motifs, subjecting them to elaborate variational and contrapuntal transformations. In terms of harmonics, Hartmanns music is tonal, though strongly chromatic, which deprives the listener of a secure sense of anchoring in a specific key.
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.
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.
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 recording offers impassioned, clear, and intelligent presentations of two little-known but impressive pieces of earlier twentieth century music.
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.
The symphonies presented on this CD are all quite different in their compositional intentions and basic stylistic traits, but they do evidence certain parallels in their formal design (two works in one movement, two times three movements), their origins and in several other aspects.
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.
The Hartmann, completed in 1933, shows the influence of Berg's Lyric Suite as well as Bartók's 1928 quartet, with which it shares this outstanding disc. Hartmann went into "inner exile" after the Nazi takeover, refusing to allow his work to be published or performed in Germany. Performed abroad, the quartet won a Swiss prize in 1936. It's a powerful work, with a dark, tragic opening that gives way to furious outbursts and energetic declamations. Making an immediate impact, it should not be missed, especially in the Zehetmair Quartet's spontaneous, tingling performance