VIRTUOSOS 44. SKORYK FOREVER

Artists:

• Oksana Rapita, piano
• Myroslav Dragan, piano

Program:

• Myroslav Skoryk (1938-2020).
  • Three jazz pieces
    • A pleasant walk
    • Obsessive motive
    • In the folk style
  • A leaf from the album
  • Three extravagant dances
    • Something Spanish-Moorish
    • A sad blues
    • A cancan as if from an old gramophone plate
  • Waltz from Partita No. 5
  • A jazz paraphrase of the mazurka in A minor by Fryderyk Chopin
    • Toccata
  • Jazz paraphrases of works by Ludwig van Beethoven:
    • Moonlight Sonata
    • Apasionata
    • To Elisa

This evening is not the end. It’s like a jazz postscript to the great dialog that has been going on throughout the festival: about freedom of expression, intellectual play, irony and seriousness. The works by Myroslav Skoryk that will be performed this time are a delicate balance between memory and improvisation, between academic rigor and jazz emancipation.

On the stage is a brilliant piano tandem of Oksana Rapita and Myroslav Dragan. They will perform iconic pages from Skoryk’s oeuvre: from sophisticated “jazz pieces” to bold stylizations on Beethoven and Chopin. The melodies here do not just sound – they play, provoke, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with nostalgia. “Sad Blues” and ‘Kankan as if from an old gramophone plate’ appear as musical character studies, as fragments of an imaginary movie where the composer is both director and actor.

This concert is a smile at the end of the phrase. An evening in which jazz and classical music do not argue, but talk – sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in full voice. And everyone who listens will hear something different.