NEW UKRAINIAN MUSIC BROUGHT TO LIGHT

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