Crises, divisions, nationalism – the beautiful utopia that is the potential of a united Europe is being thrown into disarray. This special recording by the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra under Kent Nagano, together with violinist Rebekka Hartmann, reveals the strength of the connection between different European cultures. The musicians have recorded three works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: three works that bear witness to Europe's culture and its strength, from a perspective that transcends national borders.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concerto funebre from 1939 dates back to the continent’s darkest period. Hartmann does not employ a simple or brilliant language for those dark times under the Nazi terror in Germany, but interprets his time in a complex and multilayered way. But he still builds a bridge with his music, quotes a Russian revolutionary funeral march, and looks beyond his own cultural sphere.

The violin concerto Stradivari by Uzbek composer Aziza Sadikova from 2020 points in the other direction. Inspired by a Soviet television film from the 1980s, her music journeys from the Italian Baroque to the present. It draws on Europe's rich cultural heritage and does not raise up any borders, discovering in the process a beautiful present and future.

Maurice Ravel had a similarly open and benevolent view of his home continent’s cultural heritage a hundred years earlier. His Tzigane is inspired by the music of the Roma. But even today, in Ravel's piece we hear less the appropriation of such music into a Western European soundscape than the fascination of a Western European for this specific kind of musical expression. Joy, affection, and the openness to a foreign culture are what characterise this piece.

Rebekka Hartmann, born in 1981, studied in Munich and the USA and is the winner of numerous (inter)national competitions. She enjoys a worldwide concert career as a soloist and chamber musician and her repertoire covers the entire spectrum of the violin literature from the early Baroque to the most recent music. Rebekka Hartmann plays a Stradivarius from 1675.

Composed of preeminent musicians from Eastern and Western Europe, the Rachmaninoff International Orchestra’s recordings and performances draw from the wide breadth of classical repertoire, with a focus on the Romantic and modern composers whose works have been the hallmark of Mikhail Pletnev’s celebrated interpretations. Like its namesake – composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov – the RIO is dedicated to the highest standards of performance and artistic expression.