New at Noon: October 8, 2025

With La Kobsa, cellist Matt Haimovitz offers a deeply personal tribute to Ukraine and its people through the music of Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. Centered around the haunting solo work La Kobsa – inspired by the ancient Ukrainian instrument kobza and composed in exile in 1950 – this digital release captures the resilience, heart, and enduring spirit of a nation at war.

While the recording was made at Skywalker Sound in California, the emotional core of this project lies in Haimovitz’s four-city tour of Ukraine with the Odesa Philharmonic in May 2024, made possible by a grant from the U.S. State Department. During his journey, he performed impromptu sets in public squares and for wounded soldiers, accompanied by a documentary film crew, and brought de Hartmann’s music to his homeland for the very first time.

“It was my honor to join the Odesa Philharmonic and Maestro Hobart Earle on a four-city tour of Ukraine in May 2024. Made possible by a grant from the US State Department, we brought Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann’s Cello Concerto from 1935 to war-weary audiences in his native country for the first time.

Outside of the concert halls and opera houses, I explored the breadth of Ukraine, visiting among others Odesa’s Potemkin Stairs, an outdoor farmer’s market in Lviv, and the center of Kyiv displaying captured Russian tanks. With cello in tow, I played impromptu solo sets of Bach Cello Suites, Philip Glass works and more. However, it was de Hartmann’s solo cello piece La Kobsa that elicited the widest smiles from civilians and wounded soldiers. From the first prayerful notes, there was a spark of recognition, a distraction and relief from the incessant air raid sirens, the relentless drone of power generators, and other reminders of a country at war.