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Henry Santoro You're listening to GBH's Morning Edition. There's a notable classical concert coming up this week with superstar violinist Joshua Bell joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform what they're calling a rediscovered gem. It's Thomas de Hartmann's violin concerto. Mark Herz talked to our in-house classical music expert Brian McCreath, the producer and host of the Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts on our classical music station CRB.
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Mark Herz So let's start with, who was Thomas de Hartmann?
Brian McCreath He's a really interesting character and in a way sort of a Forrest Gump type, okay? I'll draw that analogy because he's born in Ukraine in the late 1800s and then he's sent off to St. Petersburg. This is fairly common. Aristocratic family. Sent off the St. Petersburg to go to an academy. He lives through World War I, the Russian Revolution, through the 1920s, '30s, etc. And one of the people that he comes into contact early in his life is Wassily Kandinsky, the artist. So they become great friends. Later on, he becomes a friend with Pablo Casals, the great cellist. Then, late in his life, he comes into contact with Frank Lloyd Wright, who invites him out to Taliesin West in Arizona to collaborate between architecture and music. So he's this figure who kind of encounters these other famous people that we know about who seem completely disconnected. But along the way, he's a composer who writes some really, really interesting music. And this violin concerto is one of those pieces.
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Brian McCreath In the course of his life, he finds himself in Paris in World War II. He has to escape his home as the Nazis are overrunning Paris, and he finds an abandoned building with his wife where he ends up living, and there happens to be a piano in this abandoned building that he can use to compose. And he writes this violin concerto, and what he said about it is that it's sort of a look back at his original home of Ukraine as a lament for what the Nazis are doing in overrunning that country. So this concerto has not just real beauty to it musically, but also a great story and one that we can think of as really relevant to today.
Mark Herz It sounds like a fascinating piece, as you say, with a fascinating story and even some relevance to us now. Why did it need to be rediscovered?
Brian McCreath Well, the thing about Thomas de Hartmann's music is that it didn't really fit into the categories that were most successful during the course of the 20th Century. The 20th Century in classical music involved a lot of breakdown of traditional ways of writing. And so there became a very high modernist way of doing things that kind of became prevalent and shoved off to the side a lot the more lyrical and melodic ways of writing music. And that's what you find in Thomas de Hartmann. And so as composers like Schoenberg initially and then later modernist composers like Elliott Carter kind of gained prevalence, music by Thomas de Hartmann and that style of music, that just kind of got ignored.
Mark Herz And why do we want to hear it now? What has the BSO and Joshua Bell interested in it?
Brian McCreath Well, let's talk about the music itself. So we heard a little bit of the beginning of this concerto. And what I love about the way a concerto can work is that a concerto is essentially a solo voice, a singularity in dialog with a larger ensemble. And so there's a way that you can feel like a bit of relation to it. Because we are all individuals amongst a larger picture, right? So a concerto has the ability to give us something to relate to. How is this single voice relating to the world around it? And I think that's what Thomas de Hartmann's concerto does really well. So you heard the opening, and then later in this same movement, you hear that solo violin, which is plaintive and which is melodic. Then you hear the orchestra come in with kind of a scary, imposing voice.
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Brian McCreath There's this beautiful theme and variations in the second movement. And once again, it's a way that the soloist can offer certain statements, certain ways of saying things that the orchestra either counters or repeats back to it. And so, again, there's a dialog with this. The third movement of this concerto is really, really beautiful. It's incredibly short. I think it's only 23 measures, but it's beautiful little minuet and the wife of the composer, Olga de Hartmann, she said about this movement, "The composer tells us to imagine the ghost of a celebrated violinist wandering by night through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his macabre and sorrowful songs."
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Brian McCreath Very evocative words for this very short little piece. Then the fourth movement is this really virtuosic thing between the orchestra and the soloist that we can imagine is what de Hartmann was getting at when he's talking about Ukraine and his own homeland and lamenting what's happened to it during World War II.
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Mark Herz Well, I wanted to go back for a minute. The big billboard piece, Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," is also on the program, right?
Brian McCreath It is, and this is one of the great pieces in the orchestral repertoire that everybody loves.
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Brian McCreath Mussorgsky wrote it as a piano solo piece, and then Maurice Ravel applied his brilliant orchestrational mind to it, by which I mean he applied the orchestra's voice to this piece. And in fact, it was at the behest of Serge Koussevitzky, the former music director of the Boston Symphony. So the BSO has a very strong connection to "Pictures at an Exhibition," but it is an orchestral showpiece, but also very meaningful because what Mussorgsky does in "Pictures and an Exhibition" is he pays tribute to a friend of his, an artist who had died, and he imagines himself going through an exhibit of this friend's paintings. And so each of the movements is sort of a musical depiction of that painting with interspersed movements, called promenades, that are the symbol of the viewer walking through the gallery and it is an utterly brilliant piece, an utterly brilliant orchestration by Ravel and one that you'd always want to hear a major orchestra play. It's a piece that captures the imagination both through its theme and through the music itself and there's all kinds of ways to listen to it and it is absolutely magnificent.
Mark Herz Brian McCreath, producer and host of the Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts at our classical music station, CRB. Thank you as always.
Brian McCreath It's my pleasure, Mark.
Mark Herz This is GBH.
Henry Santoro The BSO concert with Joshua Bell is tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday at Symphony Hall.
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