In honor of the coryphaeus of modern Ukrainian music, a composers’ competition was launched in 2021 to celebrate the achievements of the outstanding school of the genius Myroslav Skoryk and encourage composers to write more and better. For the second time, the Competition has found its winners – skillful, ambitious, and especially talented. After all, writing a piece for a solo instrument and a symphony orchestra is a great challenge. Moreover, all the pieces were composed exclusively for this year’s competition: so let’s hear what kind of music do the authors write today? What topics are they concerned about? What will they share with the audience? 

The winner of the Third Prize, Nikita Ivanchenko, is from the city of Mariupol, which suffered terrible destruction during the Russian aggression against Ukraine. In his work, he wanted to convey a view of the essence of three integral components of the phenomenon of war. These concepts were incorporated into the titles of individual parts of the work: “Trauma”, “Madness”, and “Death”. Each of them has its own unique themes, dimensions, tempos, and principles of musical idea development. Many discoveries of the late twentieth century, such as micropolyphony, are used, making the musical landscape of each “picture” unique and the overarching theme of the war’s unvarnished aversion to it tangible.

The Second Prize winner Renata Sokachyk, inspired by the work of the famous Ukrainian poet Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, embodied his poetry in music for double bass and orchestra. She associated the timbre of this solo instrument with the image of the poet himself: young, but extremely wise and life-loving. Quotations from various poems by Antonych, which are part of his famous collection of poems “Three Rings”, determined the programmatic basis and structure of the composition, where the main character goes through several stages and finds himself in various emotional and acoustic states.

The concert will also feature music by Nadiia Kurinna, the winner of the Second Prize of the First competition’s edition. She wrote the piece “Emanatio” while she was pregnant: “It was like an explosion: to feel inside myself the emanations of the Universe that it radiates. The main theme of the work is like a tornado of these energies that immediately covers your head. While composing music and meditating on certain energies and images, I am completely immersed in them, at that moment this merger begins to vibrate, captures me completely, and gradually I try to understand, hear these sound mergers and “translate” them with musical signs, which are sometimes lacking.”

Finally, the work of the first prize winner Yurii Pikush reflects the author’s interpretation of the pulse of the present with its dizzying run into the unknown. The composer said that while writing the piece, he “imagined a soloist, an orchestra, and a conductor on stage and asked himself what kind of music they could play? What would be the result of their synergy, how would the chosen material behave, what kind of music would flow most naturally from the capabilities of these instruments and at the same time resonate with my own worldview?” For Pikush, music is the highest form of abstraction that can never be fully described in words. That’s why the title of the concert, “Concellastra”, is a word-play, which means: “concerto for cello and orchestra”.

Thus, the Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the famous Polish conductor Vincent Kozlovsky will become a guide to the microcosm of each author’s sounds. Artem Poludennyi, Oksana Lytvynenko, and Nazar Stets will be soloists. Of course, the patron of the Philharmonic and the Competition will be honored as well, with Myroslav Skoryk’s “Solemn Overture” in memory of his outstanding contribution.

Artists:

• Artem Poludennyi, cello
• Oksana Lytvynenko, cello
• Nazarii Stets, double bass
• Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra 

• Vincent Kozlovsky, conductor (PL)

Program:

• Myroslav Skoryk (1938-2020). “Solemn Overture” (2018)
• Nadiia Kurinna (1983). “Emanatio” (2021), Second Prize of the 2021 Competition, world premiere
• Nikita Ivanchenko (2004). “Pictures of War”, Cello Concerto No. 1 (2023), Third Prize of the Competition, world premiere 
  • “Trauma”
  • “Madness”
  • “Death”
• Renata Sokachyk (1990).  “Antonych-fragments”, poem for double bass and orchestra (2023), Second Prize of the Competition, world premiere
• Yurii Pikush (1998). “Concellastra”, Concerto for cello and orchestra (2023), First Prize of the Competition, world premiere

Moderator is Polina Kordovska