Ukrainian legacy

Thomas de Hartmann, celebrated by Joshua Bell and Matt Haimovitz

Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered

The name of Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) remains associated in France with that of Gurdjieff (1877-1949), with whom he signed a significant corpus of piano works – preserved since then by the anthology dedicated to him in the 2000s by Alain Kremski (Naïve). Independently of this collaboration, the personal work of the Ukrainian musician trained in Moscow by Arensky and Taneyev was created both in the USSR, in Germany – joining the group Blauer Reiter , the composer signed the score of Kandinsky’s Yellow Son –, in France – performed by famous musicians such as Tortelier, Casals, Rampal, Moyse, Schneider or Koussevitzsky – as well as in the United States, under the baton of Stokowski. Composed in Garches in 1943 (Hartmann, his wife and Gurdjieff had settled in France twenty years earlier), the Violin Concerto is intended as a “Klezmer concerto as a sign of love and solidarity” dedicated to his violinist friend Albert Bloch. Entrusted to Joshua Bell and the exiled group INSO-Lviv directed by Dalia Stasevska, the score, voluble and lyrical, nevertheless stands out from the Soviet academic style then in vogue by the finesse of its writing for the solo instrument and its electrifying abundance of traditional themes – in a spirit close to Szymanowski’s final opuses. In 1935, the refined depth of the Cello Concerto rises from a revisited popular language, particularly Ukrainian, which the soloist Matt Haimovitz, with a talent equal to that of Joshua Bell, magnifies with his radiant sound – Dennis Russell Davies being the most attentive partner at the head of the MDR Orchestra of Leipzig. The legacy of the musician, supported by the “Thomas de Hartmann Project” since 2006, continues brilliantly with this fourth part of the orchestral work of this “forgotten Master” that the city of Lviv (Ukraine) had celebrated for the first time in 2021, before the Russian invasion.