“Disgust at the terror and destruction of war unites the works on this CD”, writes Andreas Jaschinski in the essay accompanying this third issue in Metzmacher’s Hartmann cycle. True, all four pieces derive their baleful inspiration from events in the Second World War, but disgust is a term that falls a long way short of the intensity of response drawn from each composer: the tyranny of Hitler’s Reich within Germany; the Nazis’ razing of the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 and the massacre of its inhabitants; the atomic holocaust at Hiroshima; the oppression and slaughter of Polish Jewry in the Warsaw ghetto. Each composition contains moments of truly visceral impact – the horns’ heart-stopping declamation of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth at the climax of Memorial to Lidice (1942; one of the very few pieces by Martinu that does not smile), the chorus’s entry with the hymn Shem’a Yisroel at the end of A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), or the searing dissonances, like flesh being atomized from the bone, in the first of Nono’s Canti di vita e d’amore. Few symphonies have so electrifying an opening as Hartmann’s First, with rampaging timpani and brass chords like thunderbolts, counterpointed by the numbed desolation of disbelief that the events behind the music were actually happening.
This CD does not make for comfortable listening, though it is a moot point whether this is due to the ghastly associations each work carries with it or the overwhelmingly powerful expression of the notes themselves. The performances are compelling, even where rivals have an edge. Metzmacher and his Bambergers cannot quite match Ancerl and the Czech PO in the ruins of Lidice, or the starkness achieved by Rieger and the Bavarian Radio SO at the outset of Versuch eines Requiem, but the programme renders such comparisons somewhat beside the point. A disc not to be missed.'