Performers:

• Hlib Sasko, cello
• Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra 
• Theodore Kuchar, conductor

Programme:

• Yevhen Stankovych. Cello Concerto No. 2
• Bohuslav Martinů. Symphony No. 6
• Antonín Dvořák. Symphony No. 7

The festival opening traditionally defines its tone and artistic direction. This programme brings together virtuosity, the scale of symphonic sound, and the performance of Hlib Sasko — a soloist whose attentive and focused playing is capable of immediately drawing the listener in. At the same time, behind the outward ceremonial character of the event lies another dimension — more personal and intimate.

Yevhen Stankovych completed his Cello Concerto No. 2 in April 2016 after an almost half-century break from the genre. The three movements bear titles that speak for themselves: Music for Martochka, Postlude, and Grandfather’s Monologue. Stankovych is a central figure on the horizon of contemporary Ukrainian music: his Third Chamber Symphony was included among the ten best works in the world according to UNESCO in 1985.

Bohuslav Martinů composed his Sixth Symphony in exile and admitted that he himself did not fully understand how it holds together: “A work without form. And yet something sustains it — I do not know what, but there is a single line within it.” Throughout the symphony runs a four-note motif for solo cello without accompaniment, which the composer borrowed from Dvořák’s Requiem.

Dvořák’s biographer John Clapham wrote that the Seventh Symphony “has greater dramatic power and deeper emotional content than anything he had written before.” The first theme was conceived as the composer observed anti-Habsburg nationalists arriving by train in Prague — it emerges from orchestral darkness like a proclamation. Dvořák wanted this symphony to be “capable of moving the world,” and composed it accordingly: dark, tense, driven by a struggle that does not release its grip until the final bars. Only at the end does the minor mode give way to major — what one scholar described as “a noble proclamation of spiritual dignity.”