Wartime Consolations: Linus Roth | Album Review

The German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann stayed in Nazi Germany, where his music went unperformed, not because of official diktat, but because he withdrew it.

His darkly expressionist Concerto funèbre, written in 1939 to offer "hope against the desperate situation of thinking people", was premiered in Switzerland in 1940.

Warsaw-born Mieczyslaw Weinberg fled east to the Soviet Union and struck up a friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich.

His Concertino, Op. 42 is upbeat, and his Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes at times downright exuberant.

The closing piece in this vividly-performed collection is the five-minute torso of a violin sonata Shostakovich left unfinished in 1945.

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