Gloria Chamber Choir

The Gloria Chamber Choir was founded in the city of Lviv, Ukraine in the early 1990s. Since 1999 the artistic director and conductor of the choir is Volodymyr Syvokhip. The choir was among the first to revive Ukrainian religious music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had been almost totally forbidden in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities from the 1920s to the 1980s. Western church music and works that have never or rarely been performed in Ukraine became a distinguished component of its repertoire: Kanon Pokajanen by Pärt, Mass by Stravinsky, and choral works by Bach and Haydn. The first recording of the unpublished opera Alcide by the eighteenth-century composer Dmytro Bortnyansky that the choir, together with the Leopolis Chamber Orchestra, produced for the National TV and Radio Broadcasting Company of Ukrainian, as well as several CDs with Ukrainian music, are important achievements for Gloria.