In the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw, violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Dalia Stasevska are on an intensely focused mission to get the opening bars of a concerto just right. The work begins with a series of exposed chords from the woodwind, from which rises a declamatory flourish on the violin that fades into a lyrical phrase so intimate and hushed that it steals the breath. The musicians are recording the piece, so the passage is repeated over and over, then critiqued, with the finest of adjustments made.
You almost wouldn’t believe that the young Ukrainian orchestra, who are bringing such a disciplined passion to their work, had spent nine hours queuing to cross the Polish border the previous day, nor that they have had to cope with the grim realities of full-scale war for the past two years, nor indeed that they were dealing with the heartbreaking fact that one of their horn-players, Maryan Hadzetskyy, is missing in action.
But then the stakes are very high for everyone on stage. The violin concerto is by the virtually forgotten Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. The musicians of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv) are giving it its first commercial recording since the work’s premiere in 1943. They will then perform it in a concert of Ukrainian and Polish music in Warsaw. 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.
Bell is in love, ardently, with this new addition to his repertoire. “This is one of the great 20th-century works,” he tells me. He dearly wants to perform it with Stasevska and the New York Philharmonic – perhaps, he muses, pairing it with the Barber concerto, which was premiered a couple of years earlier.
Bell 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.
Indeed, in the course of his extraordinarily eventful life – which took him from north-eastern Ukraine to study with Rimsky-Korsakov in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, to Munich and a friendship with Kandinsky, to a life-changing wartime meeting with the mystic and spiritual leader George Gurdjieff, to Tbilisi in the 1920s, to Paris during the second world war, and eventually to the US where he died in 1956 – De Hartmann also wrote film scores.
“He’s managed to create something immediately accessible,” Bell says of the piece. “It has beautiful tunes but it’s also incredibly interesting: there are complex, unusual harmonies and it’s full of surprises. You think you know where it’s going but you don’t – and that’s something that’s true of all great music.”
For the orchestra, and for the Finnish-Ukrainian Stasevska, however, there is another element in play, aside from the discovery of what she also thinks is a neglected masterpiece. The work – as well as other Ukrainian pieces the orchestra are preparing to perform in Warsaw – represents a discovery, and an assertion, of a Ukrainian classical musical heritage that is only now, in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, beginning to be fully realised.
Stasevska and I first met in 2022, when she was conducting INSO-Lviv in its home city in western Ukraine – a rare visit by a conductor from outside the country to work with Ukrainian musicians. The mood, after that September’s lightning counter-attack, was optimistic. The foyer of the Philharmonic Hall in Lviv was piled high with boxes of medicine and essential supplies for the frontline. Stasevska, who had been fundraising along with her two younger brothers, had driven in a truck of humanitarian aid from Finland.
That night’s programme of music by largely living Ukrainian composers, including Yevhen Stankovych, Valentin Silvestrov and Bohdana Frolyak, was rapturously received. It was the orchestra’s first time performing much of the music. “We did play Ukrainian music before the war but maybe a more usual repertoire,” remembers first violinist Olena Kravets. “Now the list of works is becoming very long.”
Born in Kyiv, Stasevska moved to Estonia as a toddler. When she was five, her family fled the Soviet Union to Finland with little more than the clothes they stood up in. Her artist father and grandmother created a bubble of Ukrainian culture – Gogol stories read aloud; folk songs; Ukrainian spoken at home. She says of the De Hartmann concerto: “It has tunes in it that sound like folk songs I think I almost know.”
She studied violin, then viola, at Finland’s Sibelius Academy. However, after she saw a woman on the podium for the first time, it dawned on her that her obsessive score reading, and her conviction that the symphony orchestra was “the greatest musical instrument that humankind has created” could actually, perhaps, mean a future as a conductor. The first time she took up a baton, joining the masterclass of the celebrated Finnish conducting professor Jorma Panula, “was the most exciting thing I did in my whole life”.
Now, at the age of 39, and with a three-month old baby whom she breastfeeds while we talk, her career is flourishing. In the UK she is known as the charismatic principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who led the first night of the Proms last year. In the US, she was named a 2023 New York Times “breakout star”. At home in Finland, she is chief conductor of Lahti Symphony Orchestra.
In planning that concert in October 2022, she was thinking, with the Finnish side of herself, how resonant Sibelius is as a carrier of the identity of her adoptive country; how profound the power of works such as his overture Finlandia are in difficult times – “when you can’t express yourself. But with music, everyone feels it”.
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In a context in which Vladimir Putin has explicitly framed the invasion of Ukraine as a war over culture and identity, Stasevska felt an urgent need to help bring forward a half-hidden Ukrainian musical history that is there for the rediscovery – despite “the immense damage done to it by the Russkiy mir [the Russian cultural-political space] for centuries: the Ukrainian composers who were sent to the gulag, those whose scores were never published, those whose music was destroyed or lost”.
She tells me of Vasyl Barvinsky, who 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. “I thought to myself, ‘As long as we keep playing Ukrainian music, then it cannot now be destroyed.’”
For the time being, Russian classical music is not being performed in Ukraine. Kravets, the orchestral violinist, tells me that the last concert INSO-Lviv did before the invasion included Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and a Tchaikovsky symphony. But she is not missing these composers, she says, while there is so much Ukrainian music to be given its place.
Ukrainian musicians talk about the damage done not only by direct suppression of composers under the Soviets, but by the assumption that truly great art emanated from only the imperial centre, from Moscow and St Petersburg. “Peripheral” Ukraine was regarded as the home of a folky, homespun culture that was essentially inferior. Or else Ukraine’s greatest artists – for example painters Kazimir Malevich and Ilya Repin – were absorbed by the centre and generally referred to as “Russian”.
A provocative question might be, though, whether De Hartmann – Ukraine-born, St Petersburg trained, internationally nomadic by circumstance – was any more or less Ukrainian than, say, the composer Prokofiev, who is generally considered Russian though he was born in the village of Sontsovka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Or even Stravinsky, who had Cossack heritage.
Kravets agrees that the question is not straightforward. “Maybe the right way to present De Hartmann is in light of his Ukrainian origins before the Russians put their hand on him, as they did with other composers,” she suggests. Bell is cautious: he doesn’t like to think of De Hartmann’s being what he calls “tokenised” as only a “Ukrainian” composer. “I don’t want him to be marginalised in that way,” he says.
Such questions are complex and identity is never singular. I think of Sergei Parajanov, the great Soviet-era director of films including The Colour of Pomegranates, who once remarked: “I am an Armenian, born in Tbilisi, incarcerated in a Russian prison for being a Ukrainian nationalist.” But these are the issues Ukraine is grappling with in the midst of a terrifying existential invasion. The sheer energy of the current engagement with the question of what it means to be Ukrainian – played out through attitudes to language and history, through literature, art and music – is an ironic offshoot of Putin’s desire to claim and absorb the country. Where this will lead will be shaken out in the months and years to come.
In the meantime, the power of works such as De Hartmann’s violin concerto is irresistible. As the war casts its grim shadow ever more deeply, Stasevska says: “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.”