A fresh breath of air in the difficult reality of wartime. This is the idea behind the 42nd International Virtuosos Music Festival, perhaps the greatest of the Lviv National Philharmonic’s marathons. For two weeks now, the recognised treasures of classical music have been performing on the verge of spring and summer, and the festival has been declaring its unchanging principles: loyalty to the Ukrainian, a thirst for creation and a continuous search for beauty. Read more about the past chamber events of the second week.

23 May. Sentiments

Ukrainian art song is an opera in miniature

Ukrainian music has never lacked talented artists and their genre ambitions. We have a right to feel proud of the rare splendour of the vocal sphere of our culture and the amazing symbiosis that the art of words forms with it. Entrusting their compositional talents to its melodiousness and the poetic heritage inspired by it, Mykola Lysenko, Kyrylo Stetsenko, Yakiv Stepovyi, Denys Sichynskyi, Stanislav Liudkevych, Vasyl Barvinskyi, and Stefaniia Turkevych-Lukianovych created a number of gems.

In this concert, they were presented by the chamber alliance of Volodymyr Shahai and Vitalii Bobrovskyi. According to their interpretation, each Ukrainian solo song appeared before the audience as a whole opera in miniature. The panorama of moods included the primordial but relevant “joy embraced with sorrow”, crossed with landscape lyrics, intimate confessions, patriotic episodes, and even touches of comedy.

24 May. Dreams: Ukrainian Hope

The Ukrainian-German pianist Violina Petrychenko offered the audience a recital programme woven from lyrical, dreamy moods and states. It is dreams that lift us above the ordinary, that encourage us to light and joy.

The concert was a presentation of the pianist’s new disc “Dreams: Ukrainian Hope”. She points out: “Since 24 February 2022, no Ukrainian can dream of anything other than the end of this cruel and senseless war. This is a humanitarian and emotional catastrophe. Every day the news reports on its moral impact. But we are increasingly realising that for decades, on a cultural level, we have paid too little attention to Ukrainian music.”

The programme featured works by Ukrainian composers who have remained little known until now: light, romantic, and sometimes melancholic Ukrainian music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lysenko, Stepovyi, Revutskyi and Silvestrov – all romantics, dreamers and pioneers of new ways, as well as subtle masters of the piano, who see this instrument as a secret friend to whom you can entrust your own confession.

27 May. Ukrainian Poem

Nataliia Gordeeva and Violina Petrychenko held an intelligent chamber conversation about Ukraine. These are well-known performers who perform at leading stage venues. The degree of their immersion in delicate sound, elegance of forms, and, as a result, the high flight of musical thought, is always as high as possible. The Ukrainian Poem concert, like this genre itself, which originates from an ancient literary tradition, firmly connects elements of the past and present.

Here, beauty and nostalgia meld together to form palimpsests of someone’s thoughts, which now have to be transformed into the attentive listener’s own conclusions. How did the vicissitudes of life unexpectedly lead the whole culture from Lysenko’s light-hearted Biedermeier to the tender simplicity of Skoryk’s Melody? What are the semantic parallels between Beethoven’s variations and Kosenko’s play? Of course, the programme does not avoid the actual signs of our time. New works by Morten Jessen and Taras Zdaniuk sounded like a bitter reminder of today’s Kyiv and the air raids across Ukraine.