Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s music seethes with inner anguish, its intensity rooted in the composer’s internal exile in Nazi Germany. Hartmann protested Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933 by refusing to participate in Germany’s cultural life, now subservient to political barbarism. His music from this period was either performed abroad or locked away. After the war the Allied search for musicians untainted by Nazism brought Hartmann to a leading position in Munich’s cultural life, enabling him to promote younger composers such as Henze and to program works that helped overcome the cultural desert of the Nazi years. His own music is uncompromising in its integrity, passion, and power. Unrelieved pain and anger suffuse his compositions from the Nazi years, but they’re not simply gloomy political statements–they make profound musical sense and their often rhapsodic romanticism and rhythmic freedom reflect the influence of Hindemith, Stravinsky, Kodaly, and Bartok, among others. Listeners find that Hartmann’s strong personal profile makes his music instantly recognizable.
This superb CD opens with his most recorded work, the Concerto funèbre of 1939, written in reaction to Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Isabelle Faust is up against some strong competition here, especially Thomas Zehetmair’s intense interpretation (Teldec) and a dynamic version by André Gerler with Karel Ancerl and the Czech Philharmonic (Supraphon). But Faust triumphs, yielding little in intensity and projecting the bleak landscape of the piece and its frantic oscillation between despair and escape even more compellingly than her rivals. Her conductor, Christoph Poppen, does the same for the Fourth Symphony for string orchestra, equaling Ingo Metzmacher’s EMI version in its concentrated, passionate Adagios and excelling it in the rhythmic drive of the Allegro movement. The Chamber Concerto is a marvelously inventive piece for solo clarinet, string quartet, and string orchestra. Its central Dance-Variation movement is a delicious nod to Kodály, and the final Fantasie movement, opening with a ghostly clarinet cadenza, is moving in its elegiac passages and thrilling in the free flutterings of the clarinet above the supportive strings. Important music, great performances and sound.
