by In the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw, violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Dalia Stasevska are on a focused mission to get the open bars of a concertina just right. The work begins with a string of exposed chords from the woodwind, which gives rise to a promising flower on the violin that flows into a lyrical phrase so dense and so moving that it steals the breath. The musicians are recording the piece, so the passage is repeated, then reviewed, and the best adjustments are made.
You would hardly believe that the young Ukrainian orchestra, who are bringing such disciplined passion to their work, had spent nine hours queuing to cross the Polish border the day before, or that they had to go in grapple with dire realities altogether. -scale of war in the last two years, than indeed they were dealing with the heartbreaking fact that one of their cup players, Maryan Hadzetskyy, is missing in action.
We played Ukrainian music before the war – but now the list of works is getting very long
But then the stakes are very high for everyone on stage. The violin concerto was almost forgotten by the Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann. The musicians of the Lviv International Symphony Orchestra (INSO-Lviv) are giving it its first commercial recording since the work’s premiere in 1943. They will then perform it in a concert of Ukrainian and Polish music in Warsaw. The timing of this wartime revival has its own irony, given that De Hartmann’s klezmer-inflected score was deeply influenced by his distress over the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and particularly the fate of its Jewish citizens.
Bell is madly in love with this new addition to her collection. “This is one of the great works of the 20th century,” he tells me. He is keen to play it with Stasevska and the New York Philharmonic – perhaps, he thinks, pairing it with the Barber concerto, which premiered a few years earlier.
Bell says he loves the way the piece is proportioned, with its wonderfully demonic, brief ending and unusual movement, like a preceding vignette, which recalls “a violinist wandering through the war-torn steppes of Ukraine, playing his macabre songs and sorrow”, as De Hartmann’s wife Olga once wrote. The work is “cinematic”, with its vivid, almost visual feel and habit of “cutting” between musical scenes, he says.
In fact, during his very eventful life – which took him from the north-east of Ukraine to study with Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg beforehand, to Munich and friendship with Kandinsky, to a war meeting that changed the life with the mystic. and the spiritual leader George Gurdjieff, to Tbilisi in the 1920s, to Paris during the second world war, and finally to the USA where he died in 1956 – De Hartmann also wrote film scores.
“He managed to create something that is immediately accessible,” Bell says of the piece. “It has beautiful melodies but it’s also very interesting: it has complex, unusual harmonies and it’s full of surprises. You think you know where it’s going but you don’t – and that’s true of great music.”
For the orchestra, and for the Finnish-Ukrainian Stasevska, however, there is another dimension at play, other than the discovery of a masterpiece that she has also been neglecting. The work – along with other Ukrainian pieces that the orchestra is preparing in Warsaw – represents a discovery, and a confirmation, of the Ukrainian classical music heritage that only now exists, in light of the total Russian invasion of their country, beginning to fully achieved.
Russian classical music is not currently being played in Ukraine
Stasevska and I met for the first time in 2022, when she was conducting INSO-Lviv in her hometown in western Ukraine – a rare visit from a conductor from outside the country to work with Ukrainian musicians. The mood, after September’s lightning counter-attack, was optimistic. The foyer of the Philharmonic Hall in Lviv was piled high with medical boxes and essential supplies for the front line. Stasevska, who was fundraising with her two younger brothers, drove in a humanitarian aid truck from Finland.
That night’s program of music by mostly Ukrainian composers, including Yevhen Stankovych, Valentin Silvestrov and Bohdana Frolyak, was enthusiastically received. This was the orchestra’s first time playing much of the music. “We played music from Ukraine before the war but maybe a more normal repertoire,” recalls first violinist Olena Kravets. “The list of works is getting very long now.”
Stasevska was born in Kyiv and moved to Estonia as a child. When she was five years old, her family fled the Soviet Union to Finland with little more than the clothes they had. country songs; Ukrainian spoken at home. She says of the De Hartmann concerto: “There are tunes in it that sound like folk songs that I think I don’t know much about.”
She studied the violin, and then the viola, at the Sibelius Academy of Finland. However, after seeing a woman on the podium for the first time, it might mean reading his obsessive score, and insisting that the symphony orchestra was “the greatest musical instrument ever created the human race”. future as a conductor. The first time she picked up a baton, taking part in the masterclass of renowned Finnish director Professor Jorma Panula, was “the most exciting thing I’ve done in my whole life”.
Now, aged 39, with a three-month-old baby she’s breastfeeding as we speak, her career is flourishing. In the UK she is best known as the energetic principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who led the first night of the Proms last year. In the United States, she was named a 2023 New York Times “breakout star”. At home in Finland, she is principal conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra.
While planning that concert in October 2022, she was thinking, from the Finnish side of herself, how resonant Sibelius is as a bearer of the identity of her adopted country; how profound is the power of labor such as his overture in Finland in difficult times – “when you cannot express yourself. But with music, everyone feels it”.
In a context where Vladimir Putin has explicitly framed the invasion of Ukraine as a war on culture and identity, Stasevska felt an urgent need to help bring Ukraine’s half-hidden musical history forward for rediscovery – despite “the massive damage . done to him by the Russia mir [the Russian cultural-political space] for centuries: the Ukrainian composers sent to the gulag, those whose scores were never published, those whose music was destroyed or lost”.
She tells me about Vasyl Barvinsky, who spent ten years in the gulag from 1948. “His scores were burned in the back yard of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall”. After his release, he spent the next five years of his life trying to recreate his lost music. “I thought to myself, ‘As long as we continue to play Ukrainian music, it can’t be destroyed now.'”
For the time being, Russian classical music is not performed in Ukraine. Kravets, the orchestral violinist, tells me that INSO-Lviv’s last concert before the invasion included Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and a Tchaikovsky symphony. But she doesn’t miss these composers, she says, even though there is so much Ukrainian music to replace her.
Ukrainian musicians talk about the damage done not only by the direct suppression of composers under the Soviets, but by the assumption that true art arose only from the imperial center, from Moscow and St. Petersburg. “Peripheral” Ukraine was seen as the home of an essentially inferior, industrious, country culture. Or else the greatest artists in Ukraine – for example the painters Kazimir Malevich and Ilya Repin – were accepted at the center and are usually called “Russians”.
A provocative question, however, might be whether De Hartmann – born in the Ukraine, St. Petersburg, trained internationally nomadic by circumstance – was any more or less Ukrainian than, say, the composer Prokofiev, who is considered he is generally Russian even though he was born in the area. the village of Sontsovka in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Or even Stravinsky, who had Cossack heritage.
Kravets agrees that the issue is not simple. “Perhaps the right way to present De Hartmann is his Ukrainian origins before the Russians got their hands on him, as they did with other composers,” she says. Bell is cautious: he does not like the thought of De Hartmann being “tokenised” as a “Ukrainian” composer. “I don’t want it to be marginalized in that way,” he says.
Questions like these are complex and never have a singular identity. I think of Sergei Parajanov, the great director of Soviet-era films including The Color of Pomegranates, who once said: “I am an Armenian, born in Tbilisi, imprisoned in a Russian prison for being a Ukrainian national.” But these are the issues Ukraine is grappling with in the midst of a horrific existential invasion. The energy of the current engagement with the question of what it means to be in Ukraine – manifested through attitudes to language and history, through literature, art and music – is an ironic result of Putin’s desire to claim and absorb the country. Where this will continue will be shaken out in the coming months and years.
Meanwhile, the power of a work such as De Hartmann’s violin concerto is irresistible. As the war deepens its dark shadow, Stasevska says: “There is such a contrast between light and darkness in Ukraine. The music for me is the light. It gives me faith in good – and in humanity.”
• Joshua Bell’s recording of De Hartmann’s violin concerto with Dalia Stasevska and INSO-Lviv will be released in the summer. The Warsaw concert, including Bell’s performance of the De Hartmann concerto, will be broadcast on medici.tv on January 28.
