Music In Old Lviv. Closing

Performers:

• Stanislav Huminiuk, piano (Kyiv)
• Academic Chamber Orchestra “Virtuosos of Lviv”
• Serhii Burko, conductor (Ukraine/Switzerland)

Programme: Mieczysław Górecki, Witold Lutosławski, Frédéric Chopin, Mykola Lysenko, Vasyl Barvinsky, Valentyn Silvestrov, Dmytro Bortniansky, Myroslav Skoryk

The festival finale needs no grand words. It is enough to look at the programme: Bortniansky and Silvestrov, Lysenko and Barvinsky, Lutosławski and Skoryk. Music written in different centuries and different countries suddenly begins to speak about the same things — memory, silence and the human voice that never disappears.

The Academic Chamber Orchestra “Virtuosi of Lviv,” conducted by Serhii Burko, brings this evening together like a mosaic. It contains the spiritual restraint of Dmytro Bortniansky, the noble melancholy of Vasyl Barvinsky, the translucent afterimages of Valentyn Silvestrov, the Ukrainian song-like idiom of Mykola Lysenko and the energy of Myroslav Skoryk. Alongside them is Witold Lutosławski, whose every phrase, however concise, carries a sense of inner movement, and the music of Mieczysław Górecki, which naturally enters this dialogue between generations.

At the centre of the programme is Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. It is often described as an early work, but it already contains everything essential: a singing piano part, an orchestra that does not compete but supports it, and a slow movement — one of the most tender pages of music ever written for the instrument. This is the music of a young composer who does not yet know that he will become a symbol of his era, and therefore speaks with absolute sincerity.