Skoryk in Jazz

Artists:

• Oksana Rapita, piano
• Myroslav Dragan, piano

Program:

• 5 jazz pieces:
  • Pleasant Walk
  • Obsessive Motif
  • Whim
  • Patterns
  • In Folk Style
• Suite of Extravagant Dances:
  • Something Spanish-Moorish…
  • Sad Blues
• Cancan from an Old Gramophone
• Jazz paraphrases of works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin:
  • Moonlight Sonata
  • Appassionata
  • Mazurka in A Minor
  • To Elise

In this concert, the music of Myroslav Skoryk jams with Beethoven, turning the “Moonlight Sonata” into a paraphrase, and the classical cancan into a gramophone illusion from a favorite restaurant.

The Philharmonic, which has been named after Skoryk since 2020, is today bringing back to the concert hall that part of his legacy that has always been somewhat aloof from academic seriousness – but it is here that it is most clearly visible with what freedom this composer treated the material, his own and others’.

The program begins with the cycle “Five Jazz Pieces” for piano, miniatures in which Skoryk works not with jazz as a style for imitation, but with jazz as a language into which he enters as naturally as into the folklore idiom. “Pleasant Walk”, “Obsessive Motif”, “Patterns”, “Whim”, “In the Folk Style” – each piece as a separate mood sketch.

The heart of the evening is the cycle “Four Jazz Paraphrases of Classical Music” for piano four hands: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in the first part, “Appassionata” in the second, Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor and “To Elise” – a classic hit parade, translated into the rhythmic and harmonic system of jazz as if this music itself had always lived there. “Three Extravagant Dances” for piano four hands is a separate musical journey around the world: “In the Spanish-Moorish Style”, “Sad Blues”, “Cancan as if from an old gramophone record”. The latter is Skoryk in his more cinematic dimension, where you hear not the dance itself, but its old effervescent recording.