Programme

• Pierre Wissmer. Clarinet Concerto (1960)
• Volodymyr Runchak. Chamber Symphony No. 1, “In Memory of Lyatoshynsky” (1986)
• Benjamin Britten. Les Illuminations for soprano and strings, Op. 18 (1939)

Performers

• Lviv National Opera Symphony Orchestra
• Marianna Tsvietinska — soprano
• Taras Hamar — clarinet
• Ivan Cherednichenko — conductor

This year’s festival theme — Time-Making, Co-Creating — pulls us out of our daily routines to consider a simple idea: music doesn’t sound on its own. It is made anew each time, in a particular moment, by particular people, together. The opening night puts that idea to the test with three composers who never met and worked in different countries, yet who, on this one evening, begin to speak to one another.

Swiss by birth, Pierre Wissmer spent his life drawn toward France and eventually became a French citizen. Born in Geneva, he studied there before completing his training in Paris — and you can hear both worlds in his Clarinet Concerto: Swiss restraint and French colour. Taras Hamar takes the solo part.

Volodymyr Runchak’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 bears the dedication “In Memory of Lyatoshynsky.” Here the festival’s theme sounds almost literally: in 1986 a younger composer reaches back to the man often called the father of twentieth-century Ukrainian music. It is a conversation across generations — a pupil speaking to the teacher who is no longer there. This is exactly the kind of co-creation across time that gives the festival its name.

The evening closes with Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations, set to poems by Arthur Rimbaud. Consider the encounter: a young Englishman setting to music a poet who wrote his entire body of work in three years, abandoned poetry for good while barely into his twenties, and died at thirty-six. Britten began the cycle in Suffolk in March 1939 and finished it a few months later in the United States. Marianna Tsvietinska leads the listener through Rimbaud’s shifting visions — from the bold motto “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone hold the key to this savage parade”), which opens the cycle in the “Fanfare” and returns as a refrain, to its quiet fading at the close.

The concert is presented with the support of Action Musicale Pierre Wissmer.