Kopatchinskaja plays Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Frank Martin (live) скачать в хорошем качестве

Kopatchinskaja plays Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Frank Martin (live)

Built around Karl-Amadeus Hartmann's (1905-1963) Concerto funebre this evening took place in the 700-year-old Dominican church in Berne (today French Church), which was lit by a thousand candles. P.K. leads the Camerata Bern, Wieslav Pipczynski plays organ and accordion. Hartmann wrote his Concerto in 1939 out of a sense of outrage at the Nazi terror in Germany, in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Concerto contains three musical quotations: The solo violins opening theme comes from the Hussite song of 1430, ‘You who are God’s Warriors’. The Hussites, a rebellious Reformation movement in Bohemia, had the most powerful European army and sometimes the enemy took flight when they began to sing this hymn. Towards the end of the Concerto we hear the Russian song: ‘You fell as victims’ – a memorial to the dead of the unsuccessful Bolshevik revolution of 1905. The ‘victims’ Hartmann had in mind were his comrades on the political left: already in 1934 he had dedicated his symphonic poem Miserae to the victims of the concentration camp in Dachau, where in the beginnings of Nazism many leftwing leaders had been murdered or driven to suicide. In the dedication to his young son, Richard, Hartmann described these two songs as ‘Chorales’ intended to counter the hopelessness of the time. The Hussite hymn expressed a wish for a resurrected Czechoslovakia, and the revolutionary song expressed the hope that the victims should not have died in vain. As in all compositions since 1933 Hartmann also quoted ‘Eliyahu hanavi’, a Jewish song, conjuring up a vision of salvation, it's found in the finale of the Concerto funebre, but only fragmentarily: a symbol of disenfranchisement and extermination. The central part of the Concerto depicts the brutalities of the time. We hear the voices of the victims in the opening piece "Kol Nidre" of John Zorn (b. 1953), the Jewish prayer heard before Yom Kippur, and often set to music. The prayer is then recited by a representative of the Jewish community, and between the music priests of the local Polish Catholic and Russian Orthodox church add contributions in their own language, while the songs ‘You fell as victims’ and ‘Eliyahu hanavi’ are sung by a Polish folk ensemble. But what music could possibly follow the Concerto funebre, this portrayal of our earthly vale of tears? The choice fell on the Violin Concerto entitled Polyptyque that Frank Martin (1890-1974) composed shortly before his death for the Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin and inspired by six Byzantine-influenced picture-panels about the Passion of Christ (around 1308-1311), painted for the Maestà Altar in Siena by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319). Since the Polyptyque reflects on medieval 14th-century paintings, it is combined with music from the same century, a string arrangement of the Kyrie (‘Lord have mercy’) from the Messe de Nostre Dame (1360-65) by Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377). The four-part texture of this Mass was revolutionary at the time, and strongly opposed by the Pope. Frank Martin selected six paintings of Buoninsegnas altar as inspiration for the six movements of his concerto. Here are some extracts from his commentary notes: 1. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The noisy cheering of the crowd, while Jesus (solo violin) stands outside the tumult, knowing how precarious fame is. 2. The Last Supper: the Apostles’ anxious questioning, and Jesus’ loving answers. 3. Judas: a troubled, fearful man... a soul falling prey to an obsession, giving way to despair. 4. Gethsemane: the fear of isolation, the fervent prayer: ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me’ – and finally, obedient submission: ‘Thy will be done’. 5. Jesus condemned to death: the cruelty of the raging crowd, their sadistic glee at his suffering, the Way of the Cross. Frank Martin omitted the central altar painting, the Crucifixion. Its place is taken by Crux (1970) a compact work by Luboš Fišer (1935-1999), with brutal tympani, and cries of pain from the violin. 6. Finally Frank Martin’s last movement: The Glorification of the resurrected Christ. After the Polyptique, the Russian Orthodox priest chants the Easter liturgy (as a pendant to the Byzantine Orthodox pictorial style of Buoninsegna, and in recognition that Russia had the largest number of war dead: more than 20 million). Between the movements and as an epilogue, Bach’s chorales are an everlasting consolation. The Passion is the suffering God endured in and for the world’s misery, to win humankind eternal salvation: to some, this appears as a possibility, for others it is a firm belief, for yet others at least a hope. The Concerto funebre can even itself be seen as a Passion, and a testimony to the wrongs that have been done – and are still being done – to human beings, to creation, and to the Creator. (From the Booklet of the CD-project) Please inform us it you have copyright concerns and it will be our care to remove the video accordingly.