REVIEW: NY Phil and Joshua Bell Spotlight Ukraine
Above: Photo by Chris Lee.
November 8, 2025
Ukrainian-Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led the New York Philharmonic in a program at David Geffen Hall this week that framed Joshua Bell’s performance in a rediscovered gem from a Ukrainian composer with equal parts hope and mourning for the current Ukraine.
Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man opened the evening with monumental occasion. The resounding boom of the drums projected a powerful inevitability and the gleaming brass harmonies satisfied, like a promise of justice. Stasevska commanded with confident air and graceful clarity, equally successful when applying determined force, and when relaxed, loose, and supple.
Violinist Joshua Bell has not only rescued a fiddle concerto from obscurity, but unearthed a fascinating, nearly forgotten composer. The Concerto for Violin, Op. 66, by Thomas De Hartmann (1885–1956) — a Ukrainian composer whose reputation is newly emerging from the wake of the Russian Revolution and two world wars through which he struggled — is a refreshing addition to the repertoire. Bell’s warm, focused tone, and driven, yet unforced pacing found full advantage in the the 1943 concerto’s late-Romantic lyricism, while his flawless technique floated above the outer movements’ spikier modern energy. Stasevska accompanied with firm virtuosity. The orchestra matched Bell’s phrasing with vigorous and (in the ghostly Minuet third movement) delicate exchange of dialogue, revealing a novel, well-constructed score full of unexpected insight and wizardry.
Bell’s encore, an arrangement of a Chopin Nocturne was ravishing, and an opportunity to see Stasevska let her hair down and let the music breath and flow. Bohdana Frolyak’s Let There Be Light followed intermission, in its American premiere. The contemporary Ukrainian composer penned the work in response to Russia’s invasion of her home country. Walls and blobs of sound, intricate vertical structures that rotate, vary, and drip with emotional texture, slowly unfold to tell the story of a country at war.
Stasevska shaped the piece imaginatively, drawing from the Philharmonic a restrained, tightly controlled palette, and a juicy use of time, finding expression in the tapering of sound and silences. The piece builded to a harrowing climax — the unmistakable roar of grief — before reaching a peaceful conclusion. It was an inspired prelude to another piece grappling with the consequences of war — Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20.
Criminally underplayed, Britten’s short three movement symphony from 1940, was commissioned by the Japanese government to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary of the Japanese Empire. Britten produced a compact, yet Mahlerian, memorial to his late parents, and, as war upended his life, conceived it as a statement rooted in his strong pacifism. That Japan’s government had commissioned an anti-war piece (a stylistic and artistic precursor to the composer’s later War Requiem) is ironic, given that they attacked Pearl Harbor some eight months following its premiere.
Stasevska conducted an intensely riveting traversal, fearlessly shepherding the Philharmonic through Britten’s torrential landscape, The mournful Lacrymosa received careful control of arc and line, as it requires, but it was chilly, rather than seething with fire.
The piece — so scarcely programmed, not in the players’ bones like a familiar warhorse — had not quite settled enough for the orchestra to fully invest. The fighter jet battle of a scherzo, Dies Irae, nearly derailed in its flurry of gunshot triplets exchanged between trumpets, horns, and woodwinds. But their intonation was pinpoint, and the leapfrog transition into devotional ecstasy in the Requiem Aeternam returned to the aspirational tone of Copland’s fanfare, now taking the form of spiritual redemption and transfiguration.
