Peter Korfmacher 05/22/2022, 10:00 a.m
Leipzig. Actually, Alfred Schnittke’s cello concerto was supposed to be on the program of the MDR matinee in the Gewandhaus. But then, two months ago, the soloist Matt Haimovitz called the MDR chief conductor Dennis Russell Davies and described a problem to him: for years he had wanted to perform the Cello Concerto by the Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann in Lemberg. Then came Corona, now the war that Putin started. The piece is wonderful, what can you do.
Davies had the solution ready: Schnittke moves to the season after next, de Hartmann to the beginning of the concert in the Gewandhaus. Davies freely admits: “I didn’t know the work, nor the composer. But I know I can trust Matt’s musical judgment.”
Fresh and original
He’s right about that. Because de Hartmann’s Cello Concerto, composed in 1935 and premiered in Boston in 1938 under the direction of Sergei Koussevitzky with Paul Tortelier as soloist and framed by Tchaikovsky and Schmitt, is a masterpiece.
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Hartmann modeled the melody, his wide swinging bows after the music of his homeland, synagogues waft from them into our time, also klezmer. But never in the form of direct quotations, but as a sonorous character study. De Hartmann underscores this fundamentally linear music with fresh harmonics, whose small-scale chromaticism pulls at the chains of functional harmonics, but does not shake them off. He dresses the whole thing in rich mixed orchestral sounds that embrace the solo part, which is as virtuosic as it is substantial, and which in turn is grateful without currying favor.
Please on CD!
It’s beautiful music, highly emotional, original, well made – and well played. Haimovitz savors the virtuosic and melodic glories of the solo part without laying it on too thick. And Davies carries him safely through the monumental Allegro con brio and the two more concise following movements with the colorful radio orchestra. There is currently no tangible recording of de Hartmann’s Opus 57. MDR seems almost obliged to finally produce an orchestral CD again.
In any case, the cello concerto was well received by the audience, and Haimovitz expressed his thanks for the cheering with the still freshly written “Philips Song” written for him by Philip Glass, who in his old age still seems to be becoming a great melodist.