Like Karol Szymanowski, Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) spent his earliest years in that part of the Tsarist Empire which is now Ukraine – his family estate was in Khoruzhivka – but few composers have travelled further whether geographically, aesthetically or spiritually. After conventional Moscow and St Petersburg training as a student of both Arensky and Taneyev, de Hartmann fetched up in Munich, becoming a collaborator and lifelong friend of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. He subsequently entered the orbit of the perambulating Greek-Armenian teacher, guru and fabulist GI Gurdjieff, also writing film music under a pseudonym. During the Second World War de Hartmann was in occupied Paris, his interest in Jewish themes reflecting not his own East Slavic ethnicity but rather an immediate response to the brutality of the Holocaust. He spent the last years of his life in the United States. By that time his idiom had taken a turn towards the modernism only occasionally glimpsed in his unstaged wartime magnum opus, billed here as ‘Esther: The Lost Opera’. Not quite. A semi-private concert recording of 1976 featuring soprano turned conductor Christine Flasch can be sampled online, making the present venture the first wholly professional and unabridged revival.
The set is the latest and grandest initiative of the Thomas de Hartmann Project (TdHP), whose high-profile supporters include the guitarist Robert Fripp, a guest at the recording sessions. Kirill Karabits, erstwhile Chief now Conductor Laureate of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, reports that the assignment entailed the creation of a new performing edition following protracted engagement with the handwritten score. The audio-only production is nothing if not a labour of love. It is imaginatively cast too, its international line-up coping well with the French language. Those who enjoyed Joshua Bell’s ardent account of de Hartmann’s Violin Concerto (10/24) will want this too.
Karabits sees Esther as a blend of opera and oratorio sharing space with the likes of Strauss, Zemlinsky, Honegger, Poulenc, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Immediately accessible, the piece nonetheless resists easy definition. The dark lustre of its orchestration is its most distinctive feature, whether echoing Strauss and Korngold or pivoting back to Rimsky-Korsakov. As for its heterogeneous musical substance, the Debussy of Pelléas or more precisely perhaps Le martyre de Saint Sébastienseems prominent early on. Even Messiaen is glimpsed – or anticipated – as long modal lines acquire splashes of Hollywoodish orientalism.
The story of the Jewish queen who must navigate the politics of the Persian court to save her people is not taken directly from the Bible, preserving instead the three-act structure of Jean Racine’s drama of 1689 commissioned for the moral instruction of young noblewomen. Then again de Hartmann prefers extended monologues and static tableaux to conventional narrative. The few purely orchestral episodes feel oddly sketchy, emphasised by a tendency to ‘cut’ cinematically between sections. A divertissement of national dances at the start of Act 3 proves 19th-century in concept and backward-looking in content despite cribs from Stravinsky and Bartók. Big choral moments have a Verdian heft with or without modernist trimmings. The solo vocal writing is straightforward and syllabic save for exotic twiddly bits and a tendency for unassuming lines to launch into the stratosphere without warning. Sympathetic listeners may accept the lunges as heartfelt and the mish-mash of idioms as premature polystylism. Karabits extols Esther as ‘a kind of credo for the composer, reflecting on a message of peace, justice and humanity’. Sceptics will be inclined to dismiss at least some of it as kitsch. Expect neither first-rate melodic invention nor truly fast music and you’re less likely to be disappointed.
Should that sound discouraging, it does help immeasurably that the title-role is incarnated by Paris-based American soprano Corinne Winters, a formidable artist who can project both fragility and strength, as she showed in Barrie Kosky’s Salzburg production of Janáček’s Kátya Kabanová (Unitel, 10/23). A decade on from her English National Opera debut she has lately been singing Puccini at the Met and Houston Grand Opera. Luxury casting indeed for The Lighthouse, Poole, where she does her level best to create another character we will care about. The voice retains its seductive warmth and candour at the extremes of the range. Assuérus, the Persian king she dissuades from genocide, is sung by British-Ukrainian baritone Yuriy Yurchuk. His lyrical instrument, not large though perfectly formed, sounds a little dry here. There are no real weak links. The tenors Bernard Richter as Aman and Paul Appleby as the Cantor deal heroically with the composer’s demands. Richter, no stranger to the title-role of Pelléas, loyally suggests that de Hartmann ‘wanted to impose a challenge – in that way we have to trust ourselves. He wants us, not to destroy our voice, but to find the limit …’. The orchestral playing is just as resolute and William Vann has the off-season Grange Festival Chorus well trained and impressively focused. The sometimes perilous Lighthouse acoustic is not in the least woozy as handled by the expert sound team. Presentation could scarcely be bettered with attractive artwork, good if understandably partisan background essays, a full libretto and a sometimes dated translation. While Esther is no masterpiece, this is a suitably gorgeous realisation.