Get the latest gossip

‘Our music cannot be destroyed’: the duo reviving a macabre Ukrainian masterpiece

Russia has fought a long war against Ukraine’s composers. Now Kyiv-born conductor Dalia Stasevska and US violinist Joshua Bell are resurrecting a war-scarred concerto – with an orchestra whose horn-player is missing in action

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. 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. Photograph: Album/AlamyIndeed, 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.

Get the Android app