Last Jan. 10, Kyiv-born conductor Dalia Stasevska and Joshua Bell, a violinist from the US, took on the macabre and majestic compositions of legendary Ukrainian and Polish composers in the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw, Poland, as reported by The Violin Channel.
Their live performance of Thomas de Hartmann's Violin Concerto, in particular, will be getting a revival in the form of a new commercial recording with the help of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv), a fully Ukrainian ensemble filled with young musicians.
Both the De Hartmann piece and the INSO-Lviv group will make their return to the commercial space with the re-recording of the work, at least not since it was first released in 1943.
The Ironic Ressurection of Thomas de Hartmann's Work
According to an interview with The Guardian, Bell expresses his deep passion for De Hartmann's work, and is particularly "in love" with this new addition to his repertoire, saying, "This is one of the great 20th-century works."
For the US-based violinist, the piece is perfectly proportioned with its bombastic climax filled with fiendish instrumentation preceded by a vivid dream-like movement, quoting De Hartmann's wife Olga who once wrote of this movement as "a violinist wandering through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his macabre and sorrowful songs."
Bell says this piece was thanks to De Hartmann's "visual sensibilities" built by his years-and-years-worth of experience writing film scores, from his time studying with Rimsky-Korsakov in the north-eastern region of Ukraine to his time in Tbilisi in the 1920s, Paris during the second world war, and eventually to the US where he passed away in 1956.
"He's managed to create something immediately accessible," shared Bell, describing the composition as "beautiful" and also "incredibly interesting" owing to its weirdly endearing harmonies and "surprises."
For Stasevska, the Finnish-Ukrainian conductor, there is another element to this momentous resurrection of a once-neglected masterpiece as it, almost ironically, represents the resurgence of Ukrainian classical musical heritage during Russia's full-scale invasion of the country it came from and depicts.
The Warsaw concert itself, including Bell's performance of De Hartmann's macabre piece, will be available for streaming on Medici TV starting on Jan. 28.
