AMHERST — It took 80 years for the Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann’s achingly beautiful violin concerto to reach American ears. Judging from the rapturous response Friday night at a packed Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, it was well worth the wait.
Composed on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943, when de Hartmann was grieving for his lost Ukrainian homeland, the violin concerto, amazingly, hasn’t been performed anywhere in 60 years. An international movement to restore de Hartmann’s varied music to prominence, led by several musicians based in Western Massachusetts, has acquired urgency from the war in Ukraine. Recordings by Joshua Bell of the violin concerto and Matt Haimovitz of the cello concerto are expected later this year while Elan Sicroff will be performing de Hartmann’s piano concerto with the Pioneer Valley Symphony on March 18 in Amherst.
Friday’s able soloist was Andriy Tchaikovsky, backed by the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine under its energetic conductor, Theodore Kuchar, who was commanding and impish by turns. The orchestra’s concertmaster, Tchaikovsky drew out the opening theme of the long first movement like a silken skein, his head pillowed on his violin as though listening for a distant melody. His fluttering trills and rising glissandos recalled Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending.” In contrasting folk-dance sections, he summoned a fiddler’s repertoire of rapid-fire double stops. De Hartmann referred to the piece, composed for a Jewish violinist during a horrific time for Ukrainian Jewry, as his Klezmer concerto. “To better understand the work,” he wrote, “imagine the ghost of a celebrated violinist wandering by night through the war-devastated Ukrainian Steppes playing his macabre and sorrowful songs.”
De Hartmann’s music, written over the course of a peripatetic life spent largely in exile after the Russian Revolution and two world wars, has been something of a wandering ghost itself. De Hartmann was in touch with many of the major artistic and spiritual movements of the 20th century. Born circa 1884 on his aristocratic family’s estate in northern Ukraine, he trained in St. Petersburg under the same teachers as contemporaries like Prokofiev and Scriabin. After his successful ballet “La Fleurette Rouge” (1906), starring Nijinsky and Pavlova, he spent time in Munich, befriending the painter Kandinsky, a lifelong friend. He was a founding member of the Blue Rider artistic movement, where he pushed for inner necessity in composition rather than mechanical rules, and called for “anarchy in art.”
A born collaborator, de Hartmann wrote many pieces with his spiritual leader, the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff, versions of which can be heard on the 1980 “Sacred Hymns” album by the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. With their Erik Satie vibe melded with melodies Gurdjieff collected during travels in Eastern Europe, these meditative vignettes have a hint of the yoga studio. While in Paris, de Hartmann also composed over 50 film scores. Moments in his violin concerto seemed just right for a great melodrama like “Now, Voyager.” De Hartmann returned to serious composing around 1934, when he worked closely with Pablo Casals, a steady supporter, and Jean-Pierre Rampal, among others. He moved to the United States in 1950, and lived at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, in Arizona (Wright’s wife at the time was a Gurdjieff follower). He died in 1956.
Hearing an unfamiliar work like the violin concerto, the concertgoer searches for analogies. The Lviv orchestra suggested two. Brahms’s “Tragic Overture,” played with precision from the strings and bluster from the horns, set a somber mood and Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”) offered hope amid turmoil. The Lviv musicians tore into the Dvorak with relish, with its dance themes sounding uncannily like de Hartmann’s. Dvorak’s ravishing music, composed by a Czech visitor with the intention of giving Americans a piece of music adequate to their country, was inspired in part by African-American spirituals.
I wouldn’t have minded if the English horn, sounding the theme popularly known as “Goin’ Home” in the Largo, had milked the melody for all it was worth. I got my wish when the solo violin and cello picked up the theme with gusto. There is an unforgettable passage in Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark” when Thea Kronborg, the future opera diva from a humble Scandinavian family in Colorado, first hears Dvorak’s tune in lonely Chicago, and is immediately overwhelmed by her memories of “the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands.” Of the melody, she feels, “There was home in it, too.”
Amid the repeated standing ovations of this inspiring evening, rewarded by a rousing encore of Anatoly Kos-Anatolsky’s Ukrainian Dance from the Ballet “Sochyne Krylo” (The Jay’s Wing), there was the lingering wish that these very hardworking, very well-traveled musicians — in the middle of a grueling 40-concert tour in the United States with a stop at Carnegie Hall this coming Wednesday night — might soon be able to return to a homeland fully theirs.
THE LVIV NATIONAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA OF UKRAINE
At Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Friday night