Thomas de Hartmann, despite his Germanic name, was born into an aristocratic Russian family in Ukraine, in 1884. After showing musical talent as a child he studied in Moscow, initially with Anton Arsensky, then Sergei Taneyev. His star rose quickly, and in 1906 a 3-hour ballet score, Le Fleurette Rouge, was premiered to great acclaim. Hartmann’s earliest music was in the style of Rimsky-Korsakov (who was director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory where Hartmann studied), but his aesthetic became more modernist through the influence not of composers but contemporary painters. One of these was his personal friend Wassily Kandinsky.

Thomas de Hartmann

The composer’s later career was side-tracked when he and his wife attached themselves to an itinerant spiritual guru, the Georgian mystic George Gurdjieff. They literally followed him around until 1929. During this time, Hartmann collaborated with Gurdjieff (who was musically illiterate), notating and arranging melodies for use in spiritual exercises. Gurdjieff would pick tunes out on the piano, based on Middle Eastern folk music he had heard on his travels. Simple and haunting, they have been recorded on some ‘new age’ labels, but...