Violinist Joshua Bell’s New Album, “Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered”

Released on Pentatone, the album features Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann’s violin and cello concertos

Joshua Bell’s new album, “Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered,” highlights the cinematic Violin and Cello Concertos of Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann — an important compositional voice in his own time.

Bell recorded Hartmann’s Violin Concerto in Warsaw with conductor Dalia Stasevska, and the INSO-Lviv Orchestra, whose musicians were able to temporarily leave their country for the performance. 

The Cello Concerto was recorded by Matt Haimovitz with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. 

The new recordings aim to re-establish de Hartmann’s oeuvre, plus bring musicians together in times of war. 

Born in 1884, de Hartmann was widely acclaimed in Russia at the turn of the 20th century and enjoyed a successful career in France during the 1930s and 1940s. However, his music fell into obscurity following his death in 1956.

Among de Hartmann’s works include four symphonies, several operas, concertos, sonatas, and songs with texts by Marcel Proust, Paul Verlaine, James Joyce, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as fifty-three film scores. By his early 20s, he was one of the best-known living composers in Russia, John Mangan wrote. 

Bell and Haimovitz’s new album was generously supported by the Thomas de Hartmann Project, which was founded in 2006 to reintroduce the composer’s music and is an ongoing initiative. 

To purchase and listen to the album, click here.

“This violin concerto is both heart-wrenching and uplifting and is as gripping and relevant today as it was when it was composed in 1943,” Bell wrote on Facebook. “I have been seeking the appropriate partners to help me bring this masterpiece to life, and I have found them in the Ukrainian based INSO-Lviv Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska, a conductor who has approached the work with the sincerity and gravitas that it deserves.”

“Thanks to this project, I am hopeful that Thomas de Hartmann’s music may touch the hearts of many more people, both in his homeland of Ukraine and around the world,” he added. 

A short video of Bell discussing de Hartmann’s Violin Concerto can be viewed below. 

Beginning his formal music training in 1897, at the age of 11, de Hartmann studied composition with Anton Arensky, renowned former professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory and then current director of the Imperial Chapel in St. Petersburg. 

After Arensky’s death, de Hartmann studied counterpoint with Sergei Taneev, whose previous students had included Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Reinhold Glière. He later attended the St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory to study piano with Anna Esipova-Leschetizky, and received his artist’s diploma in 1904.

In 1950, the de Hartmann family moved to Manhattan in New York City. In April 1956 an American debut concert of de Hartmann’s music was scheduled to be performed in New York’s Town Hall, but de Hartmann died suddenly on March 28 of a heart attack. His students, however, went ahead and performed the concert as a memorial tribute. His wife, Olga de Hartmann devoted the rest of her life to promoting her husband’s music both in the U.S. and abroad.