Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered

When, six years ago, Joshua Bell first set eyes on a score of Thomas de Hartmann’s 1943 Violin Concerto he felt he was discovering a rare and neglected masterpiece. In its klezmer-inflected themes, he found a profoundly moving response to the Nazi occupation of the composer’s homeland Ukraine—an expression of anguish at the fate of its Jewish citizens that was yet hauntingly beautiful. “I was shocked that something so compelling had been written that I’d never heard of before,” Bell says. “Somehow this piece had slipped through the cracks, and yet it is one of the great 20th-century pieces for violin and orchestra. I just had to get it out there.” With this in mind, Bell has teamed up with the Ukrainian INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Finnish Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska to perform and record de Hartmann’s Concerto. Taking place in Warsaw last year, amid the Russian war on Ukraine, the recording brought the players together at a time when they, too, were experiencing the fear and oppression that had inspired de Hartmann’s music. Warsaw was considered close enough, and safe enough, for Stasevska’s players to get to from Lviv, “but still there were a lot of logistical problems,” Bell explains. “They had to queue at the Polish border for nine hours the day before—it took a lot to make it happen.” But the fraught circumstances only seem to add to the passion heard here. From the outset, the deeply expressive qualities of de Hartmann’s Concerto are on display, beginning with brooding harmonies in the orchestra, out of which the solo violin rises with a melody filled with pathos. In many ways, Hartmann’s writing recalls the soundworld of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s war-scarred works, and fans of English wartime composer William Walton will appreciate the haunting play of light-and-darkness heard here. “But the Concerto is not derivative in any way,” Bell says. “There’s a lot of 20th-century music that sounds painful and dissonant,