Hartmann
Esther
Corinne Winters et al; The Grange Festival Chorus, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits
Pentatone PTC5187424 115:47 mins
Thomas de Hartmann has long been one of those fascinating musical almost-men: a Ukrainian-born aristocrat, trained in the orbit of Rimsky-Korsakov and Taneyev, then drawn into the strange world of the mystic Gurdjieff before ending up, after years of upheaval and exile, in wartime France and later the United States.
That tangled life gives Esther an added charge. Begun during the Nazi occupation and completed in 1946, it is hardly the work of a sheltered aesthete; you hear a composer who experienced dislocation and reinvention, and who still believed in the stage as a place of moral and emotional reckoning.
Devotional atmosphere, dramatic urgency
Esther, based on Jean Racine’s play, sits somewhere between opera and oratorio, but the eclectic score never sounds ‘in between’: the drama keeps moving, the choruses bite and the orchestral writing is full of colour and purpose.
Kirill Karabits proves a persuasive guide, shaping his forces with conviction, keeping its long spans focused and alive. The Grange Festival Chorus is a tour de force, supplying plenty of devotional atmosphere and dramatic urgency.
The strong cast catches the intensity and grandeur of the piece. Soprano Corinne Winters is ideal and utterly convincing in the weighty title role; tenor Paul Appleby excels as the Chantre (Cantor), setting the work’s moral and ceremonial tone.
Esther may be an eccentric rediscovery, but it never feels like a musicological exercise. Hartmann’s work has an overwhelming personality, delivered with shattering energy in Pentatone’s world premiere recording.
