While
I have never done much about music on my Blog, concentrating more on visual
artists, I have a passion for music. My mother sang opera, and since
my father’s idea of great music was Tennessee Ernie Ford, my mother started
taking me to concerts at the age of four. And as a Benedictine nun I
guess you could say I am adicted to Chant.
But
this on-going story of Kyiv-born conductor DALIA
STASEVSKA fascinates me and
gives me hope that much is being done to preserve Ukraine identity and culture.
Russia
has fought a long war against Ukraine’s composers. Now Dalia and US
violinist JOSHUA BELL (who Mother Felicitas and I heard in Seattle
some years ago- sitting in the president’s box) are resurrecting a war-scarred
concerto – with an orchestra whose horn-player is missing in action.
There were Ukrainian
composers who were sent to the gulag and those whose scores were never
published, or whose music was destroyed or lost.
For example, Vasyl
Barvinsky spent a decade in the gulag from 1948. His scores “were burned in the
backyard of the Lviv Philharmonic Hall”. On his release, he spent the remaining
five years of his life trying to reconstruct his lost music. Dalia sid in an
interview: “As long as we keep playing Ukrainian music, then it cannot now be
destroyed.’”
In
January 2024 in Warsaw, Joshua Bell and Dalia did a fund-raising concert for
the war in Ukraine, with the Liv Symphony Orchestra. One of the pieces
which thrilled Joshua to be "resurrected", was Thomas de
Hartmann’s Violin Concerto. The young Ukrainian orchestra, who brought a
disciplined passion to their work, even after spending nine hours in line to
cross the Polish border the day before ( never mind all the grim realities of
full-scale war for the past two years) played beautifully.
The
recording done of this piece, was the first commercial recording since the
work’s premiere in 1943. The timing of this wartime resurrection has its
own irony, since de Hartmann’s klezmer-inflected score was deeply influenced by
his distress at the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and especially by the fate of
its Jewish citizens
( Klezmer music is often composed using folk scales common to the Roma. These include harmonic minor, harmonic major,
and Phrygian dominant. An aim of klezmer music is to make the
instruments take on human characteristics, such as the sounds of laughing or crying.)
Joshua
says “This is one of the great 20th-century works,” and he would love to
perform it at the New York Philharmonic with Dalia.
Joshua says he loves the way the piece is proportioned, with its thrillingly demonic,
concise finale preceded by an unusual, vignette-like movement that recalls “a
violinist wandering through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his
macabre and sorrowful songs”, as de Hartmann’s wife Olga once wrote. The work,
with its vivid, almost visual sensibility and habit of “cutting” between
musical scenes, is “cinematic”, he says
Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956) was widely acclaimed in Russia at the turn
of the 20th century, enjoying a successful career in France during the
1930s and 1940s. His unique voice brought together many styles to produce a
colorful and vibrant catalog. However, since his death his music has fallen
into obscurity.
As Dalia says: "As the war casts its
grim shadow ever more deeply, there’s such a contrast between light and dark in
Ukraine. Music is to me the light. It makes me believe in good – and in
humanity.”
Together these two great musicians are helping the world to see
this!
Top photo: Kasia Strek
