Karl Amadeus Hartmann
* Concerto funebre for violin and string orchestra
* Symphony No. 2
* Symphony No. 4 for string orchestra
Vladimir Spivakov, violin; Guerzenich Orchestra of the Cologne
Philharmonic/James Conlon.
Capriccio 10983 {DDD} TT: 56:02
Summary for the Busy Executive: A heart-to-heart with Hartmann.
For years, Brahms's music bored me stiff, with the exceptions of the
first piano concerto, the double concerto, the Schicksalslied, the Vier
ernste Gesaenge, and the motets. I would literally fall asleep during
performances of the symphonies. I wholeheartedly concurred with George
Bernard Shaw's assessment of the German Requiem: "borne patiently only
by the corpse." Mind you, I could analyze his music six ways from Sunday.
Technically, I could tell you what went on. I simply didn't care. Even
worse, I didn't see why Brahms thought anyone should care. Did it bother
me? At some level, yes. I knew that a lot of listeners smarter than
me loved Brahms, and I knew exactly how clueless I was. Fortunately,
people kept playing Brahms for me, whether I wanted them to or not,
and after about three decades, light finally broke.
It's not quite that bad with me and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, but it
comes close. I admire the man tremendously. An artist in the Third
Reich, rather than flee the country, he remained in a kind of internal
exile, opposed to the regime (when such a stance usually brought fatal
consequences) and refusing to allow any of his works to be performed or
published. He kept composing and putting away his finished work for as
long as it took to remove the Nazis from power. After the war, he revised
much of it. In the early Forties, he studied with Webern, but he never
crossed over to the serialist or dodecaphonic camp. Instead, he generalized
their principles and applied them to his essentially post-Wagnerian
chromaticism. Some have called him an heir to Bruckner, but I don't see
it myself beyond a penchant for solemnity and the symphony. A mini-boom
in his music seems to be taking place in Europe. He died, relatively
young, in 1958.
The music demands much of a listener. Unlike Bruckner in his
symphonies, for example, Hartmann writes extremely tight, gradually
bringing out relationships between apparently dissimilar thematic groups.
His artistic tone is serious as a cancer ward. In a way, he reminds me
of the Schoenberg of the chamber symphonies. But Schoenberg's high
seriousness comes from an obsessive reverence of musical tradition, while
Hartmann's seems moral or ethical, like Berg's. Schoenberg usually seems
to me to comment on music itself, Hartmann on humanity.
The Symphony No. 2 (Adagio) works with a theme that slips and slides,
like a Middle Eastern riff, around a minor triad. The theme resists
symphonic development, in that it doesn't really lead anywhere (it begins
and ends on the same note), and yet Hartmann manages to generate authentic
symphonic movement, mainly through progressively varying dynamic and
tempo, almost always in parallel. The slow music is soft, the fast music
loud, and the symphony proceeds from soft to loud, slow to fast. Hartmann
builds a long span of this progression, reaching the climax more than
three-quarters through, at which point he recaps the opening. The music
really grips. It gradually dawns on you that almost every idea in the
symphony relates to that one theme, slightly hidden by some extremely
distinguished variation and contrapuntal maneuvers. Also, in a
brilliantly-conceived coda, we seem to go through the entire symphony
at warp speed, before the orchestra basses settle on a single, soft note.
The fourth symphony, for strings alone, revises a work from his "exile,"
for strings and solo soprano. Through a quirk I really don't understand,
the fourth symphony was completed and appeared before the third symphony.
The liner notes don't help. The first movement is yet another adagio,
which, though slightly longer than the second symphony, seems to go on
for days more. The "black-and-white" color of the strings make already
bleak material bleaker, and there's no delight in the athleticism of
strings, as in Stravinsky, Bartok, or Hindemith. Just when you think
the music will take off with a bound, Hartmann puts the kibosh on it,
and we're back to pure dirge -- songs from the Slough of Despond. Toward
the end, a solo violin comes in with some very beautiful stuff, which
should flower into something that lifts the material to a new level, but
never does. I can't deny the movement's seriousness of purpose nor the
composer's attention to detail, but it all strikes me as thick and heavy,
with very little purposeful motion.
Things pick up in the second movement, a savage allegro, which alternates
with a mournful Laendler. It seems a Mahlerian update. This movement
interests me far more than the others, but compared to something like
William Schuman's fifth (also for strings), it comes over to me as pretty
small beer. The third-movement finale returns to the Great Dismal Swamp,
even to the extent of borrowing some of the thematic material of the
first movement. Here, the music takes the form of a slow march, with
contrapuntally imitative episodes. But the material wasn't really all
that distinctive or distinguished to begin with -- not to me, at any
rate -- and though Hartmann gets his music to proceed with more impulse
than in the first movement, I still don't really care much about either
one.
The Concerto funebre -- as its title suggests, another downer --
inhabits the same emotional neighborhood as the Berg violin concerto.
Hartmann, however, gets the violin to sing more than does Berg. Indeed,
this is my favorite Hartmann work, rising to great eloquence. My main
objection to Hartmann is that so much of his music just seems to go by
without sticking to you. Here, the writing for both soloist and string
orchestra gets inside you, unlike so much of the fourth symphony. The
music amounts to more than the attitude of grief, no matter how genuinely
felt. There's real poetry here. The first movement sings a gorgeous
lament. The second movement allegro has the sharp edge of somebody like
Shostakovich, without stooping to imitation (in fact, Hartmann's concerto
predates both of Shostakovich's by a bunch). The finale Hartmann
designates as a "Chorale (slow march)." To me, it comes closer to a
chorale than a march, even a slow one, and again reminds me strongly of
the finale of Berg's concerto, not in idiom or actual notes, but in mood,
as the violin meditates solemnly above the string chorale.
Conlon, Cologne, and Spivakov give all these works terrific performances.
I heartily recommend this disc to Hartmann fans and to Hartmann novices
like me. I compared Conlon's reading of the second symphony to Dohnanyi's
with the Cleveland Orchestra (coupled with a magnificent account of
Mahler's Ninth, on Decca 289 458 902-2). As you would expect, the
Cleveland players performed stunning feats of playing, getting so soft,
for example, they flirt with the border of non-hearing. Dohnanyi
emphasizes the garish, Expressionist aspects of the score, while Conlon
stresses the links to the Late Romantic symphony. Dohnanyi clocks in
much earlier than Conlon but, curiously enough, achieves far less coherence
and sense of forward movement. Indeed, on the basis of this CD, I think
Conlon the current major champion of Hartmann. Praise goes to Spivakov
as well in the concerto for breaking through Hartmann's characteristic
reserve without stepping over into caricature. The recorded sound,
though less "layered" than Dohnanyi's Decca and a little too forward for
the violin soloist, is nevertheless quite good.
Steve Schwartz
|