Karl Amadeus Hartmanns work is very difficult to attribute to any particular compositional school. Although he was not a revolutionist in terms of notation or performance forces, he was able to creatively subordinate all the achievements of modern musical language to innovative formal approaches. Hartmann wrote with extraordinary verve, creating artistic phrases with a broad ambitus, at the same time he could masterfully juggle short motifs, subjecting them to elaborate variational and contrapuntal transformations. In terms of harmonics, Hartmanns music is tonal, though strongly chromatic, which deprives the listener of a secure sense of anchoring in a specific key.

With a title like Time & Eternity and graphics featuring the disembodied head of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, you know you're in for an ambitious program. Kopatchinskaja's albums have been getting increasingly experimental as her career has developed, and this one is at no time boring, whatever you may think of the overall concept. Sample Crux, by Lubos Fiser, for violin, timpani, and bells, with the timpani pounding away as a kind of avatar of dread. This said the structure of the program is not quite as unconventional as it may at first appear to be.

Carl Seemann's Complete Deutsche Grammophon Recordings box set features recordings with Fritz Lehmann, Berliner Philharmoniker, NDR Sinfonieorchester, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Bamberger Symphoniker, Mnchner Philharmoniker, Ferdinand Leitner and many more. Highlights include his celebrated Mozart records on 11 CDs and his famous Beethoven and Brahms duo recordings with violinist Wolfgang Schneider.

This disc combines Hartmann's Symphony No. 1 (1937/1948), a requiem for the victims of the Nazis and the dead of World War II, using Walt Whitman's verses from "Leaves of Grass" written for the dead of the Civil War and a soprano singer, with anti-war pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, Bouslav Martinu, and Luigi Nono.

Botstein clearly feels great conviction for this music and this comes across both in performance and in the booklet text, part of which he contributed. These are eloquent performances directed by a man who clearly sees Hartmann as a natural partner to Shostakovich.

This recording offers impassioned, clear, and intelligent presentations of two little-known but impressive pieces of earlier twentieth century music.

The symphonies presented on this CD are all quite different in their compositional intentions and basic stylistic traits, but they do evidence certain parallels in their formal design (two works in one movement, two times three movements), their origins and in several other aspects.

The first commercial gramophone recording of a German symphony after World War II was that of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Foutrh Symphony for string orchestra under the derection of Franz André. More than fourty years later, this work once agains opens a complete studio recording of Hartmann's symphonie, now under Ingo Metzmacher.

A CD of the Bamberger Symphoniker, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, was recently released, featuring works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963) and Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975). The pairing of these works will not be a coincidence, because both composers were not only friends, but they also shared a number of characteristics, such as the proclamation of humane ideals and the pursuit of expressiveness. Perhaps their only point of contention was the twelve-tone technique, which Hartmann didn't like, while Dallapiccola was intensively involved with it.

It is quite incredible that the genre of the Symphonie lives on after Mahler. Mahler's Ninth Symphonie was a farewell to beauty,the Master Signifier and the images of childhood, the fragmented yet challenging experience of the metropolis. The transgression of beauty was to cloud over Europe in ways Mahler's imagination could hardly fathom. With Hartmann the Symphonie lives in a exiled world, it is not one free to speak, it is one where the voice, (as Agamben says someplace) carries Being, yet in what form? It is a voice smashed from the SS jackboots, a voice of the dispossessed and the homeless.