Performers:

• String Quartet of the NotaBene Chamber Group

Program:

• Borys Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968, UA). String Quartet No. 2, Op. 4 (1922)
• String Quartet No. 3, Op. 21 (1928/1966)

Moderator: Polina Kordovska

Is there anything more controversial for a postmodern sensibility than clinging to the past? Perhaps only to abandon it entirely, to create a new world with no ground beneath it — neither the foundation of earlier epochs nor their fragments. For Ukrainian composers, the task of revisiting their own history has been a challenge faced by every generation.

Mutilated by tsarist and Soviet regimes, the pages of the past were often reduced from eloquent texts to coded fragments. The so-called “national code,” described in countless popular studies, had to be not only sought and deciphered but, more often, extracted from within.

Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century — a time when Europe offered a multitude of movements and “-isms” — Ukrainian composer Borys Lyatoshynsky was preparing to become a central figure of Ukrainian modernism. Among the most powerful evidence of this are his string quartets.

Ambassadors of the composer on both Ukrainian and international stages — the musicians of NotaBene Chamber Group — present the very core of Lyatoshynsky’s chamber legacy: the whimsically lyrical Second Quartet and the thematically rich Third Quartet, both born of the 1920s. Their sharpened, fractured melodic lines not only sketched the outlines of Lyatoshynsky’s future style but also traced the contours of Ukrainian modernism itself.

Mariia Levkovych