Lyatoshinsky, Boris

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    Review: Protecting and Defending Ukraine’s Cultural Identity

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    A festival responds to the assaults and insults of war by celebrating the composer who shaped the nation’s contemporary music, Borys Liatoshynsky.The shadow of the war in Ukraine once again hovered over the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival on Friday when it began its three-day tribute to the 20th-century composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Merkin Hall.Hours before the opening-night program, which highlighted composers who influenced Liatoshynsky, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, of war crimes, and issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s consul general in New York, recounted that news to the audience on Friday and was greeted with applause.When the 2022 festival took place, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fresh, with Putin attempting to justify his actions in part by claiming that Ukraine had no independent cultural identity. Holubov, in his remarks on Friday, said that this year’s festival, the fourth, comes at a time “when our cultural identity, our history and our music are at stake.”On Saturday, the second day of programming traced a pedagogical lineage from Liatoshynsky to several living composers. The Sunday afternoon program pairs two Liatoshynsky quartets with works by Bartok and Copland, composers who, like Liatoshynsky, are credited with defining a national style. Again and again, reclamation resists erasure.Born at the end of the 19th century, Liatoshynsky lived through the Ukrainian War of Independence, the rise of Lenin and Stalin and both world wars. He embraced expressionism early in his career and became an influential teacher at Kyiv Conservatory, where his students included Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer.Liatoshynsky, a composer with an intensely volatile style, wrote music that didn’t comply with the Soviet Union’s aesthetic of socialist realism. He was dogged by censors and branded a formalist. After Stalin’s death, he found his way back to his original compositional voice late in life and is now remembered as the father of Ukrainian contemporary music.Liatoshynsky’s Violin Sonata (1926), a thorny work full of short bursts of agitation, opened the program on Friday. The violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv gave the piece’s core thematic material — a melody that skitters, scrapes and then leaps upward — a bold arc, and she applied an eerie calm to passages marked sul ponticello (a technique of bowing near the bridge that produces a high, scratchy sound). At times, though, she and the pianist Steven Beck seemed to set aside interpretive matters just to get through a piece of hair-raising difficulty.Following the Violin Sonata, Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) sounded almost lissome, with the clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich shaping long melodies with a full, lovely tone and understated warmth. The violist Colin Brookes and the pianist Daniel Anastasio likewise cultivated the beauty of Liatoshynsky’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano (Op. 65), with Anastasio painting a dappled night sky in the Nocturne and Brookes hinting at a mixture of solitude and disturbance.The conductor James Baker made perfect sense out of the unusual instrumentation for Liatoshynsky’s Two Romances (Op. 8), which uses voice, string quartet, clarinet, horn and harp. He highlighted Liatoshynsky’s text painting in the first song, “Reeds,” with strings that rustled like paper and then refracted like shards of light. The bass Steven Hrycelak was a genial narrator with an oaken timbre.Liatoshynsky’s avant-garde-minded students inspired him, and they were represented by two pieces. Sylvestrov’s “Mystère” was a symphony of percussion in which the alto flutist Ginevra Petrucci elegantly snaked her way through a battery of timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, marimba, Thai gong and more. Each instrument cut through the air with its own vibrations — splashes, thwacks, tinkles, knocks — for a cumulative effect that was captivating to experience live. The brief “Volumes,” by Volodymyr Zahorstev, blared forth with a chaotic play of instrumental timbres.The concert closed with Liatoshynsky’s “Concert Etude-Rondo,” a devilish showpiece given a crisp performance by Anastasio. This was a late piece, written in 1962 and revised in 1967, a year before Liatoshynsky’s death. Its stubborn character extends from driving octaves in the bass to shattered-glass effects in the piano’s delicate upper reaches.The transliteration of composers’ names in this review follows a 2010 resolution adopted by the government of Ukraine, according to Leah Batstone, the festival’s founder and creative director. As Holubov said at the start of the concert, Ukrainian language is the heart of the Ukrainian nation — and Ukrainian music, its soul.It was hard not to see — or rather, hear — a symbol for the persistence of the Ukrainian people in the uncontainable, endlessly restless music of a composer who refused to concede his identity to the state. More

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      When Ukrainian Music Wasn’t Under Threat, It Thrived

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      For a brief period in the early 20th century, Ukrainian composers put a national twist on modernism, free from Russian or Soviet regulation.In late March, a month after his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, decried what he called “the West’s Russophobia.”Laying the blame on an encroachment of so-called cancel culture and sanctions imposed in response to the war, he claimed that Western countries were “attempting to erase a thousand years of culture” in Russia. To support his dubious claims, Putin pointed to instances of Western European and American orchestras dropping performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff — even though many of these composers are hardly wanting for attention on the world’s biggest stages.Since the invasion began, the question of whether to perform music by Russian composers in the shadow of Putin’s war has been debated, with arguments both in favor of and against cancellations. Yet for some Ukrainians, these discussions miss the point.As one Ukrainian online petition argued, the history of composers like Shostakovich, who was censured by the Soviet musical apparatus, has long overshadowed parallel — and often more violent — repressions against Ukrainian composers. Under the Czar, and then later the Soviet regime, Ukraine’s robust and diverse musical traditions — including Cossack songs and Romani music — were heavily regulated (and, at times, censored entirely) by the authorities. More recently, Putin has outright denied the existence of a unique Ukrainian culture.For a brief period of time in the early 20th century, however, Ukrainian composers enjoyed a dearth of regulatory oversight from Russian or Soviet powers. Between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, the city of Kyiv was a hotbed for modernist music and experimentation — often, with a particularly Ukrainian twist.Mykola LysenkoAlamyUkrainian composers at the turn of the century, many of them rooted in the Russian Orthodox choral tradition, wrote more for choir than any other ensemble. Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), who earned the title of “father of Ukrainian music,” spent the first several decades of his professional life collecting and arranging Ukrainian folk songs, many of which he later incorporated into his original compositions. His choral works helped to forge a distinctly Ukrainian sound. Some — such as “Prayer for Ukraine,” which the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York performed on “Saturday Night Live” shortly after the start of the Russian invasion — gained prominence in both religious and civic spheres. And his output provided the foundation for Ukrainian musical education in the years to come.Church vocal traditions, said Liuba Morozova, a music critic and the artistic director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, helped in uniting Ukrainian composition under a national banner in the early 20th century. “Choral culture,” she explained, “was given an important place by both the Ukrainian People’s Republic” — an independent country that existed from 1917-20 — “and the Soviet government in the 1920s.”It was a student of Lysenko’s, however, who made the biggest impression in Kyiv’s choral scene. Mykola Leontovych, born in Vinnytsia in 1877, picked up where his teacher left off by setting a cappella folk songs and drawing from national forms of poetry and prose. Through imitation, counterpoint and attentive orchestration, Leontovych brought the sounds of the Ukrainian nation to a broader public. His most popular arrangement, “Shchedryk” (1912), is better known to Anglophone audiences as the “Carol of the Bells,” but his settings of 19th-century poems by Taras Shevchenko show a deep understanding for vocal timbre and color.Leontovych’s more dramatic works emulated the tradition of the Kobzars, the Ukrainian bards and history bearers who accompanied themselves on the bandura, a multistringed plucked instrument similar to a zither. Kobzars, the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky said in a phone interview, constituted some of the earliest experiments in Ukrainian musical sovereignty. Their poetry brought Ukraine’s past into dialogue with its present, and as such posed an ideological challenge to Russian colonial power.Their national identity was lost on neither the Czar nor the Soviets, both of whom regulated the genre extensively. By the 1930s, the Stalinist regime had carried out mass executions of bandura players throughout the country. At the end of the preceding decade, Sonevytsky said, there were at least 300 bandurists registered in Ukraine. After 1936, there were four.KobzarsDenys Savchenko/AlamyLeontovych also paid the ultimate price for his patriotism. In January 1921, he was shot in his sleep by the Soviet secret police.His death, however, did little to scare others in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, into submission. In the wake of his murder, the city’s musical community gathered to form a society in his honor. The Leontovych Musical Society, organized less than two weeks after his murder, brought together composers, musicians, critics and folklorists to explore a specifically Ukrainian style of the modernism in vogue across Western Europe at the time. Led by the composer Borys Lyatoshynsky, the society sponsored hundreds of ensembles, pedagogical initiatives and discussions dedicated to Ukrainian music. It provided many of the city’s young composers with an opportunity for aesthetic and ideological experimentation.The music that came out of the Leontovych Society during its seven-year existence was inventive and provocative. With intense orchestration and complex harmonies, Lyatoshynsky’s music drew on the modernism of composers like Bartok and Berg while incorporating national idioms. His Second String Quartet, composed in 1922, is a 25-minute work that draws on atonal harmonies, extended techniques and miniature leitmotifs to trace a dramatic trajectory from a wall of sound to a crooked folk dance. Levko Revutsky, another composer with the society, fused traditional melodies with innovations in craft — such as in his Second Symphony, from 1927, which sets folk songs into dialogue with sweeping, impressionistic harmonies. It won first place that year in the society’s competition to honor the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution.Mykola LeontovychAlamyIn collaborating with visual artists, writers, academics and directors, the Leontovych Society joined a robust experimental scene in Kyiv. Among those who worked with the composers was Les Kurbas, a film and stage director whose Berezil Theater, founded in 1922, staged ambitious plays from around the world in abstract multimedia productions. For Kurbas, music was the linchpin for his synthetic art, which used rhythm and melody as a sort of pace-keeper for the action onstage. Berezil drew hundreds of partners and admirers from across the Soviet Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More