Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022)

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      At Eurovision, Ukrainians Find Community Far From Home

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      This year, the competition is hosted by Liverpool, England, on behalf of Ukraine. A discounted ticket plan means thousands of displaced Ukrainians can attend.This week, there were reminders round every street corner in Liverpool that this northern English city is hosting the Eurovision Song Contest as a stand-in for last year’s winning country, Ukraine, where war continues to rage more than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion.Inflatable songbirds decorated with patterns from traditional Ukrainian embroidery dotted the streets. In the city center, sandbags covered a monument as part of an art installation that replicates measures taken to protect statues in the war-torn country. There were blue-and-yellow flags everywhere.But perhaps the most visible reminder of Ukraine’s centrality to an event hosted in an English city nearly 2,000 miles from Kyiv was the presence of thousands of Ukrainians who have fled the war at home.Among them is Anastasyia Sydorenko, 33, who fled with her 6-year-old daughter Polina to Liverpool after war erupted in February 2022. She has tickets to the Eurovision final on Saturday night.“I feel now like I am in Ukraine,” Sydorenko said. “Everywhere I go I see Ukrainian flags, Ukrainian signs, more Ukrainian people in our national clothes. It’s so cool, it warms my heart, really.”She will join thousands of displaced Ukrainians living in Britain who are attending the Eurovision Song Contest this week after some 3,000 heavily discounted tickets were offered to them. The attendees make up just a fraction of the more than 120,000 Ukrainians who have come to Britain as part of a sponsorship program that was put in place last year.The Albert Dock in Liverpool. The city has a rich musical history, and was made a UNESCO City of Music in 2015.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn Liverpool, inflatable songbirds decorated with patterns from traditional Ukrainian embroidery are one way the competition is reflecting Ukraine’s role. Mary Turner for The New York Times“We felt that if this was going to seriously reflect Ukraine, you had to have Ukrainians within the audience,” said Stuart Andrew, Britain’s Eurovision minister. “This is an opportunity for us, in a more celebratory way, to stand in solidarity with those people who are here,” he added.Last summer, the Eurovision organizers ruled out holding the contest in Ukraine, and Britain, whose act, Sam Ryder, had placed second in the 2022 competition, was asked to step in as host.“We want everyone to have fun, but at the same time there is a serious message here, that this should be happening in Ukraine right now,” Andrew said. “And the fact that it isn’t is a stark reminder of the cruelty of Putin and his regime.”Andrew said that demand had been high for the discounted tickets, with more than 9,000 Ukrainians applying, and that it was heartening to see an event “that even just for a couple of hours one evening takes their mind off the displacement issues.”Those who, like Sydorenko, were lucky enough to get tickets described it as a bright spot in a difficult year. Sydorenko is from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where she hid in a basement for 10 days when the war first gripped her country.Eventually, she escaped in a convoy of cars filled with women and children and made her way across the border, then on to Latvia, she said.“Mentally and psychologically, it was really hard, because it’s something different, everything is new,” Sydorenko added.She later fled to Britain after connecting online with Elisse Jones, a Liverpool resident who offered to host Sydorenko, her daughter, her sister-in-law and her nephew. It was not easy at first for the children, who didn’t understand the language.“They didn’t speak a word of English before, and now they’re full-on scouse,” Jones said, referring to the Liverpudlian lilt now clearly detectable in the children’s English.“They are like little sponges,” Sydorenko said with a smile, putting her hand on her daughter’s head and describing how well she has been doing in school.At the opening of the photography project “The Displaced: Ukrainian Women of Liverpool.” Anastasyia Sydorenko, second from left, fled Ukraine with her 6-year-old daughter Polina, far left, before cofounding the project. Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo days before the Eurovision final, Sydorenko joined a group of Ukrainian women unveiling a collaborative exhibition called “The Displaced: Ukrainian Women of Liverpool” at an art space in the city. The project features the portraits of — and interviews with — 24 women who fled to Liverpool.Sydorenko, a co-founder of the project, described it as a form of therapy for many of the women. The exhibition is just one of many poignant reflections on the war’s impact on Ukrainians that is on display across Liverpool this week.The Eurovision festivities are also drawing in Ukrainians living around Britain who traveled long distances to take part. Oksana Pitun, 39, and her daughter, Daniella, 12, who are living with a host family in Southampton — on England’s south coast — left their home on a bus at 5:40 a.m. to see the semifinal on Thursday night. The journey took them more than seven hours, and they had plans to take the night bus home once the competition ends.But Pitun said they were overjoyed that they had managed to get the reduced-rate tickets.“We feel we are supporting our country by doing this,” Pitun said. “And it also feels so nice to go somewhere, be part of something, and just not think about the war.”On Thursday afternoon, Pitun and her daughter visited the Ukrainian Boulevard in Liverpool’s docklands, set up as a place for Eurovision fans to experience Ukrainian art and culture. Daniella chatted with the volunteers in her mother tongue and switched seamlessly back and forth to English.Sandbags covered a Liverpool monument as part of an art installation that replicates measures taken to protect valuable statues in Ukraine.Mary Turner for The New York TimesOksana Pitun, center, and her daughter, Daniella, center left, were overjoyed that they had managed to get the reduced-rate Eurovision tickets for Ukrainians. “We feel we are supporting our country by doing this,” Pitun said. Mary Turner for The New York TimesWhile many Ukrainians who have sought shelter here are eager to return to their home country as soon as it is safe to do so, others have begun to feel at home in Britain.Tanya Kuzmenko, 34, was traveling in Sri Lanka with her boyfriend, who is British, in February 2022 when they woke up to news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.“We didn’t believe it, we were in shock,” she said. She felt they couldn’t return to Ukraine, so she applied to join her boyfriend’s family at their home near Liverpool under the sponsorship program. She moved here last summer.Late last year, she started her own digital agency, and she said she has been thrilled to see Liverpool, which has become like a second home in the past year, host Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine. While she wasn’t able to get tickets to any of the contest events, she has spent the week attending concerts in the EuroVillage fan area.She joined crowds of Ukrainians there on Thursday night to see a performance by Jamala, a Crimean Tatar singer who won Eurovision in 2016. A Ukrainian flag draped over her shoulders and her head of blonde curls blown by the breeze, Kuzmenko swayed to the music, a smile on her face.Jamala, a Crimean Tatar singer, performing at the EuroVillage fan area in Liverpool. She won Eurovision in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesShe said British people have been coming up to her when they see her with her flag to voice their support for Ukraine or share their connections to the country.“When I arrived last year, there were only one or two flags, and now the whole city has flags,” she said. “I feel proud. We are included, and it’s amazing.” More

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      How Liverpool Put on a Song Contest for Ukraine

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      This year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party,” a broadcasting official said. It just happens to be taking place in Britain.When Ukraine won last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it gained the right to hold this year’s event. And despite Russia’s invasion, it insisted it would do it.Ukraine’s public broadcaster issued plans to host the spectacle in the west of the country, out of reach of Russian missiles, while politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the nation would make it work.Even some foreign leaders backed its cause. Last summer, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister at the time, told reporters that Ukraine won Eurovision “fair and square,” so it should host, regardless of the war.“It’s a year away,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be fine.”But Ukraine’s dream of staging this year’s Eurovision has failed to materialize. On Saturday night, the final of the glitzy contest — which is expected to draw a television audience of around 160 million — will take place 1,600 miles from Kyiv, in Liverpool, England.Last summer, after months of discussions, the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the contest, agreed with Ukrainian authorities to the change of location. With Britain finishing second in last year’s contest, it was an obvious choice. Its public broadcaster, the BBC, agreed to organize the event.This is Britain’s ninth time hosting the contest since it began in 1956, but the BBC team knew this year would be different. Broadcasters that host Eurovision normally use the contest to advertise their country and its culture to a global television audience. This time, Britain would need to take a back seat.Commemorative merchandise on sale in central Liverpool.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag displayed in a Liverpool branch of McDonald’s.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe historic buildings on Liverpool’s waterfront were lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMartin Osterdahl, the executive supervisor for Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union, said in an interview that this year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party.” Britain just happened to be hosting it, he added, echoing a sentiment made by a British pop act.Shortly after the switch was announced, the BBC introduced a contest to select a city to stage the finals, eventually picking Liverpool over six other contenders. In October, the BBC hired Martin Green, an event producer who oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, to oversee the event.In a recent video interview, Green, 51, said he flew immediately to Warsaw and met with Ukrainian broadcasting officials.Those officials said they wanted a Eurovision that was a huge “celebration of great Ukrainian culture — past, present and future,” Green recalled. They also wanted the reality of Russia’s invasion shown onscreen — something with the potential to strike a downbeat tone for the traditionally campy, showy spectacle. But they insisted the contest should still be fun, Green said.Alyosha, who was Ukraine’s Eurovision entry in 2010, performing in Liverpool on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York Times“It was really important to have that blessing — that permission — about the nature and style of the show,” Green said.Back in Britain, Green had just eight months to arrange the contest. He assembled a team — including outside agencies — to work on the event. (Over 1,000 people have contributed, he said.) Every week, his staff had video calls with Ukrainian colleagues to discuss and agree on aspects of the competition. Those included this edition’s slogan, “United by Music”; its stage design; and the special performances that take place onstage during breaks from the competition.Sometimes, Green said, the Ukrainian side had to delay scheduled calls at the last minute “because an air raid siren had gone off,” or cancel meetings entirely because of power cuts.“Those were incredibly sobering moments,” Green said. “Ukrainians have such a sheer force of will to carry on, that sometimes you could easily forget.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s public broadcaster, was a vital sounding board for the British team, Green said. In a recent interview, Nenov said it was sometimes “surreal” to be discussing sparkly outfits and dance performances as Russian bombs fell on Ukraine. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said. “But thanks to Eurovision, I was able to stay strong. It gave me the ability to go on.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s state broadcaster, in Liverpool. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNenov, 33, is overseeing several special performances by Ukrainian musicians that will play during competition breaks. With those, he said, he wanted to change viewers’ perceptions of his country. When Ukraine hosted Eurovision in 2005 and 2017, he added, those broadcasts featured clichés of traditional life, including embroidered outfits and dancing girls with flowers in their hair. “That’s not Ukraine,” Nenov said; this time, he would show a more modern vision of the country.Both Nenov and Green declined to give details of Saturday’s grand final, insisting it should come as a surprise for television viewers, but both said the show included Ukrainian and British pop stars. The war would be mentioned, Green said, but in an elegant fashion that was appropriate for “a great big singing competition.”Osterdahl, the European Broadcasting Union official, said that this year’s collaboration between two countries to host Eurovision was “unprecedented.” But if Ukraine wins again on Saturday, he would need another country to step up to host Ukraine’s next party. One day, he said, he hoped the war would end, and Ukraine could host for itself. More

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      The Ukrainian Duo Tvorchi Will Sing of Wartime Bravery at Eurovision

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      With a song inspired by the bravery of Ukrainian soldiers, the pop group Tvorchi sees the beloved, often campy global song competition as a serious opportunity to represent their country.Whenever their rehearsals for the Eurovision Song Contest were interrupted by air raid sirens, the Ukrainian pop duo Tvorchi would race to the safety of underground bunkers, sometimes wearing their matching stage outfits.While recording a video in Kyiv of their contest entry, “Heart of Steel,” they lost electricity, sending them on a hunt for generators.But they are quick to stress that those inconveniences have been minor compared with what others are going through.“Everyone can meet hard and difficult times,” said Andrii Hutsuliak, 27, who formed the group with the singer Jimoh Augustus Kehinde, 26, describing what has become the theme of their song. “We just wanted to say, be a stronger and better version of yourself.”They are about to get a chance to project that message at the world’s largest, glitziest and, often, campiest song contest: Eurovision, in which entrants from countries across Europe and beyond are facing off Saturday on a broadcast that is expected to draw some 160 million global viewers, making it the world’s most-watched cultural event.This year’s contest should have been held in Ukraine because the country’s entrant last year, Kalush Orchestra, won with an upbeat track that mixed rap and traditional folk music. But with Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine continuing, the host city was switched to Liverpool, in England.Tvorchi, which means “creative,” won the right to represent Ukraine after performing “Heart of Steel” at a Eurovision selection contest staged in a metro station deep below Kyiv, out of reach of Russian bombs. They were flanked by backup dancers wearing gas masks, and images of nuclear warning signs flashed on screens behind them.“It still feels kind of unreal,” Hutsuliak said as he prepared to leave for Liverpool.Known now as a sprawling television extravaganza with wild costumes, eclectic mixes of acts and over-the-top performances, Eurovision began in 1956 as a way of uniting Europe after World War II. As it has grown — and expanded beyond Europe, with entries from Israel and Australia — it has often reflected wider political and social issues.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has taken the contest’s entanglement with politics to new heights. The European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the contest, banned Russia from competing immediately after its invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian victory at last year’s Eurovision, awarded by a mix of jury and public votes, was widely seen as a show of solidarity with the besieged nation.In Ukraine, which has won top honors three times since making its Eurovision debut in 2003, the contest has long been hugely popular and valued as a way for the nation to align itself culturally with Europe. Now it is also seen as a way to keep Europe’s attention focused on the war.As Hutsuliak and Kehinde sat down for an interview at a hip restaurant in central Kyiv called Honey, they apologized for having had to delay the meeting by a day, explaining that they had some urgent business: securing the paperwork that men of fighting age need to exit the country so they could travel to Liverpool.Their song “Heart of Steel” was inspired, Hutsuliak said, by the soldiers who worked to defend the now-ruined city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, holding out months longer than anyone imagined possible. The soldiers made their final stand at the sprawling Azovstal steel plant.Hutsuliak said he clearly remembered the online clips that soldiers filmed of their defense.“When I saw these videos, I saw people with strength, staying solid even in the most terrible conditions,” he added. Soon afterward, the pair wrote the track with lyrics seemingly aimed at invading Russians.“Get out of my way,” Kehinde sings. “’Cause I got a heart of steel.”When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February last year, martial law meant that Hutsuliak couldn’t leave, while Kehinde, a Nigerian citizen originally from Lagos, could. His mother, panicked, called him on the morning Russia started bombing Ukrainian cities and urged him to get out.“That day I think I had 25 to 30 relatives call me,” Kehinde recalled. “They wanted me to leave.”Tvorchi performed in a train station in Kyiv last month. Their Eurovision track, “Heart of Steel,” is inspired by Ukrainian soldiers. Zoya Shu/Associated PressKehinde, whose stage name is Jeffery Kenny, visited his mother in Nigeria for a week — “because she wouldn’t stop panicking,” he said — but then quickly returned, as he’d built a life in Ternopil, a city in western Ukraine. At first he thought the war would last only a few months, but then the reality of the conflict set in.The band would never have formed if Kehinde had not made the unusual decision to move, in December 2013, to Ukraine for college to study for a pharmacy degree. As one of the few Black people in Ternopil, Kehinde stood out, he recalled, but that proved instrumental to the band’s formation. One day, Hutsuliak introduced himself and asked if he could practice his English, promising that Kehinde could try out his Ukrainian in return.The pair soon became friends, and a year later, at Hutsuliak’s birthday party, they decided to try making music together, with Kehinde singing mostly in English but also in Ukrainian. At first it was just a hobby, but they’ve gone on to release four albums and pick up awards.Tvorchi in Amsterdam. The duo had to secure special paperwork to leave Ukraine at a time when men of fighting age are forbidden to leave.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesMany of their early tracks were love songs, but the invasion led them to write a series of more intense tracks including “Heart of Steel” and “Freedom,” which has defiant lyrics including “These walls / You can’t break them down.” Those songs were not written with Eurovision in mind, but in December the pair competed in a live contest in Kyiv to become Ukraine’s entry.Tvorchi has also supported Ukraine by playing concerts on the back of trucks for troops and partnering with United24, a Ukrainian charity, to raise money to buy incubators for premature newborns in the country’s strained hospitals.The concert that got them to Eurovision, performed in a metro station where Russian bombs couldn’t interrupt the acts, was surreal, Kehinde recalled. Trains sped past throughout rehearsals and the final event.“I thought more than once, ‘What in the world is going on right now?’” Kehinde said. But when he watched the broadcast later, he was amazed to discover it looked like a professional studio, with lighting and graphics.The pair didn’t expect to win, but they became Ukraine’s choice. Ever since, they have been trying to live up to that decision, which they called an honor.This year, they reworked their track a little to make it even more representative of the country. While Eurovision songs are frequently sung in English, the version of “Heart of Steel” that will be performed on Saturday now contains a section in Ukrainian.“Despite the pain, I continue my fight,” Kehinde sings during it. “The world is on fire, but you should act.” More

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      Illuminating Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, a Pinnacle of Russian Sacred Rep

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      Steven Fox and the Clarion Choir are tending to a less well-known part of the composer’s canon for his 150th birthday: His choral works.In a classical music world obsessed with anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the 150th birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn notice. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to focus on his war horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.It seems to have fallen to Steven Fox and his excellent choirs to tend to Rachmaninoff’s motley but treasurable body of choral works. The sacred ones, particularly — with their flowing yet restrained lyricism and none of the bombast or sentimentality often associated with the composer — represent the very best of Rachmaninoff.On Wednesday, Fox, the artistic director of the New York-based Clarion Music Society, will return to his alma mater — Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. — to lead the Clarion Choir in Rachmaninoff’s exquisite All-Night Vigil, a pinnacle of the rich Russian Orthodox repertory. They will repeat the performance on Friday at Carnegie Hall.Fox, 44, first conducted the work — commonly called the Vespers, after a liturgical service included in it — as part of a senior project at Dartmouth in 2000. He also handled the logistics — simple enough, you might think, because Russian Orthodox practice bans musical instruments, using only voices.But those voices must be special, combining virtuosity with smooth blend. The basses, in particular, have to travel comfortably and sonorously below the clef, and typically, professional ringers are needed to fill out an amateur performance. (Clarion will feature Glenn Miller, the current go-to American basso profundo, in its two performances.)And to boot, the text is not quite in Russian but in antiquated Old Slavonic.“I can’t say I knew exactly what I was doing at that time,” Fox said in an interview. “There was a point about a week before the concert when I felt overwhelmed. I remember calling my adviser in tears and saying: ‘It’s too much. I can’t keep track of all the details.’ But leading up to the performance, even during it, I just felt calm. That really was the moment I discovered that I wanted to pursue conducting as a profession.”Fox has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular. He and Clarion have presented the Vespers often at New Year in New York and recorded it beautifully for Pentatone.Fox, who first tackled the Vespers as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesThe performances this week are just one part of Fox’s yearlong celebration of the Rachmaninoff anniversary. At New Year, he led Clarion performances of the composer’s other great sacred work, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And in March, he conducted the Cathedral Choral Society, of which he is music director, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a stirring rendition of “The Bells,” Rachmaninoff’s tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, at the National Cathedral in Washington.Still to come, in November, are the cantata “Spring” and “Three Russian Songs,” with Clarion at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, where Fox lives.Might Fox worry about the appropriateness of celebrating a son of Russia so deeply rooted in its culture as Russia wages war on Ukraine?“I did have misgivings,” he said. “My main concern was singing liturgical music, given the church’s role in what is happening now. But as I thought more about Rachmaninoff’s story, I thought in a way it relates to what many Ukrainians are experiencing. He kind of kept politics at arm’s length for a long time, but at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, he said: ‘I have no choice. I have to leave.’”In the end, Clarion added a program note for the New Year performances of the Liturgy: “There is a terrible war taking place in the part of the world from which this beautiful music comes. As we sing tonight, we pray for peace in the New Year.”And Leonid Roschko, an Orthodox priest and a basso who sang the Deacon in those performances, added a prayer to the Liturgy: “That Thou mightest enlighten with the light of Thy divine wisdom the minds of those darkened with hardness of heart, and protect the people of Ukraine from any harm.”On study and work travels to Russia before the invasion, Fox honed another specialty, Baroque music. He founded Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, which called itself the nation’s first period-instrument orchestra. He also unearthed what he calls “the earliest known Russian symphony,” from about 1771, by the Ukraine-born Maksym Berezovsky.Back in New York, Fox took the lead in reviving the Clarion Music Society, which had fallen idle shortly after the death of its founder, Newell Jenkins, in 1996. Fox took it over in 2006 and, while expanding its range and pushing it to new heights of virtuosity, he furthered his own ventures into early music, notably including that of Bach.So when the New York Philharmonic asked him to cover for Jaap van Zweden during a run of Bach’s towering “St. Matthew Passion” in March, he was eager to do it. No matter that rehearsals were to begin the day after the “Bells” performance in Washington.“I know the piece, and it would have been hard to say no,” Fox said. “Jaap and I got on very well. I admired his intensity. I thought he knew the score really well, and yet every time I went back to his office, he was studying it more, preparing.”Van Zweden reciprocated the sentiment: “Steven Fox comes from the same school of interpreting Bach that I do,” he said in an email. “His excellent ears and good ideas were a real asset. I have asked him back next year when we do the Mozart Requiem at the New York Philharmonic.”And Fox continues to till Russian soil. Spurred by the renowned music publisher Vladimir Morosan, Fox has been exploring music by Alexander Kastalsky. For Naxos, he recorded “Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes” with Clarion, and prepared Clarion and the Cathedral Choral Society to take part in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of an expansion of that work, “Requiem for Fallen Brothers,” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.Morosan has described Kastalsky as “a seminal figure upon the landscape” of the early 20th century. Yet he remains so obscure in the West that he didn’t even register in the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. What other rarities might Fox and Morosan unearth? More

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      in Theater

      Dmitry Krymov, Exiled Russian Director, Starts Over in New York

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      Dmitry Krymov, one of Russia’s most eminent directors, is among the dozens of artists who have left their homeland since Russia invaded Ukraine.If Dmitry Krymov, the celebrated Russian director and playwright, were directing a play about his life, the third act would begin, he mused, in a cramped, art-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It is winter, nearly a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, turning his brief visit to the United States into an open-ended exile after he spoke out against the war. And his living room has suddenly burst into flames.So much brownish-black smoke is filling the apartment that he can’t see his arms, and he’s gasping for air. The computer containing drafts of his plays is burning. He is struggling to stamp out the flames with a blanket. Then darkness. His lungs are so badly damaged by the fire, which was apparently caused by a wire that short-circuited, that his doctors keep him in an induced coma for nine days.But this third act, Krymov stressed later, is not meant to be the final one.Surviving a fire, he added wryly, had been a baptism of sorts for his new life in the United States. “A fire brings you closer to a country, when you burn,” Krymov, 68, said recently as he recovered at a friend’s apartment and reflected on his self-imposed displacement, which he sees as a banishment of sorts, but also as a rebirth. “My life as a play needs to end with something, and I hope that we’re not at the end,” he added.Krymov, who scaled the heights of Russian theater during a storied career, left Moscow last year, the day after the invasion of Ukraine, for what he thought would be a six-week trip to the United States to direct a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. He packed only one small suitcase.Before getting on one of the last Aeroflot flights to New York, he became one of the first prominent Russian cultural luminaries to sign a public letter criticizing the war. “We don’t want a new war, we don’t want people to die,” the letter said.The reaction was harsh. In the months that followed, he said, the authorities closed seven of his nine plays, which were playing at some of Moscow’s most vaunted theaters, and his name was erased from the posters and the programs of the two that continued. The cancellations were crushing, he said, but he had no regrets about signing the letter.“Sometimes,” he said, “you are facing something that is so obvious there is no other way.”During President Vladimir V. Putin’s first two decades in power, Russians in many walks of life — including the arts — were sometimes forced into compromises as the space for free speech narrowed. But with the war, that space has slammed shut almost entirely. As Putin has introduced some of the most draconian measures against freedom of expression since the end of the Cold War, Krymov has become part of a growing exodus of Russian artists, writers and intellectuals who have left the country, dealing a heavy blow to Russian culture.Krymov and the actor Annie Hägg rehearsed “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a mash-up of works by Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill.Marina LevitskayaChulpan Khamatova, one of Russia’s most prominent stage and screen actresses, left the country; so did Alla Pugacheva, one of its defining 20th-century pop stars. Young, ascendant filmmakers fled. Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, denounced the war, left the Bolshoi and joined the Dutch National Ballet. The list goes on.For Krymov, the 14 months since he left Moscow have had all the audacious drama, tragedy and dark comedy of one of his plays.In Russia, Krymov was revered by critics and audiences alike for his brazenly original and visually driven re-imaginings of classics from Pushkin, Chekhov and Shakespeare, among others. Now his antiwar stance has pushed him into a period of reinvention: as a little-known director in the United States, a country whose language he speaks only haltingly. He has gone from rehearsing plays at the famed Moscow Art Theater, where Stanislavski once presided, to rehearsing at a vacant barbershop in Midtown Manhattan that his new Krymov Lab NYC rents for $10 an hour from a friend.Last fall, his group was given a residency at La MaMa, the venerable East Village theater. He and a company of New York actors held workshops there of his adaptation of Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words),” and his own work “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a play mashing up works by Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. He hopes to stage them at La MaMa next fall.“I want to work and have my work shown in the United States, to make them angry back home that I am gone,” he said. He brandished a handwritten manuscript of a play he is working on, its words blurred after being drenched by a fire hose.“Manuscripts don’t burn,” he said with a hint of mischief, quoting the devil Woland from “The Master and Margarita” by the Soviet-era writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The quote, with its suggestion that true art cannot be destroyed, has taken on new meaning for him.Liz Diamond, chair of directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, has known Krymov for nearly two decades and teaches his work in her courses.“He has lost everything,” she said. “He was at the absolute heights of Russian theater.”She credited him with pioneering a visceral and strikingly visual form of theater, known as “theater of the artist,” where classic texts are mined for contemporary themes and fused with deeply personal meditations.Anya Zicer and Jackson Scott in Krymov’s “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words).” Steven PisanoHe often uses a single line, scene or gesture as a jumping off point in works like “The Square Root of Three Sisters,” an encounter with Chekhov that he staged in 2016 with students at Yale. In his play, an actress reinterprets a line about a fork left outside by repeatedly stabbing herself with a fork.Diamond recalled she was “thunderstruck” years ago upon seeing Krymov’s wordless take on “Don Quixote,” with the whimsically phonetic title “Sir Vantes. Donkey Hot.”“Dima creates a poetry of space that I’ve never seen anyone else achieve,” Diamond said.Born in 1954 in Moscow, Krymov was the only child of two titans of Russian theater: His father, Anatoly Efros, who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, was one of the leading Soviet theater directors of his generation, while his mother, Natalya Krymova, was an influential critic.Krymov said his father was Jewish, and that his parents, who were concerned about antisemitism, gave him his mother’s more Russian-sounding surname. Before he could walk, he said, he crawled around the backstages of leading Moscow theaters.“I never felt I was living in my father’s shadow,” he said. “My parents didn’t pressure me.”After graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School in 1976, he initially started out as a set designer, which has deeply informed his approach. He eventually became a successful painter, and returned to the theater in 2002 almost by accident, he said, and only reluctantly. He had mentioned to an actor friend an idea for a plot twist in “Hamlet” in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father doesn’t want his death avenged. At his friend’s urging, he directed the play, which bombed with critics but proved a hit with theatergoers.Soon he began teaching at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts, the oldest theatrical school in Russia, and he went on to direct and design dozens of productions.He and his wife, Inna, a frequent collaborator, who often finishes his sentences and lives with him in New York, have one son, age 40, who lives in Miami.This year Krymov’s work has taken on a sharper satirical edge as it grapples with the fate of Russian culture, which is under pressure, for very different reasons, at home and abroad.In the first scene of his new adaptation of “Eugene Onegin,” a group of elderly Russians are telling the story of Pushkin’s poem, as if to children. Then, suddenly, an actor planted in the audience violently throws a tomato at them, accusing them of ignoring the brutality of Putin’s war.“How can you talk about the beauty of Russian culture?” the actor screams. “It’s disgusting!”Krymov has many friends in Ukraine, and he said that he had broken down in tears several times during rehearsals of “The Cherry Orchard” in Philadelphia, thinking of them sheltering underground while bombs rained down.Still armed with his dark and fatalistic Russian sense of humor, he appears resigned to his new life. Alluding to Dostoevsky’s satirical novel “Demons,” he said he wouldn’t return home until “the latest demons had left Russia.”“It’s very safe to be a demon now in Russia,” he said. “Even if you are not a demon, you are going to put the tail and the horns on just in case they are looking for one.” More

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      Now Playing in China: Putin-Aligned Artists Shunned in the West

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      As Russia works to shore up its image and rebuild its soft power after its invasion of Ukraine, it is strengthening cultural ties with friendly nations, including China.Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the star Russian maestro Valery Gergiev has been persona non grata in the United States and Europe, fired by many cultural institutions because of his long record of support for President Vladimir V. Putin, his friend and benefactor.But this week, on the heels of a summit between Mr. Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Moscow, Mr. Gergiev received a hero’s welcome in Beijing, where he appeared with the Mariinsky Orchestra for the ensemble’s first foreign tour since Russia invaded Ukraine.Chinese fans showered Mr. Gergiev with cards and bouquets, calling him by his nickname in China, “brother-in-law,” a play on the Chinese version of his surname. Audiences cheered his Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, as well as a surprise rendition of a Chinese Communist classic, “Ode to the Red Flag.” The state-run news media hailed the visit as the beginning of a new era of Russia-China cultural ties.During the tour Mr. Gergiev rebuked his Western critics and vowed to redouble his efforts to promote Russian culture around the world.“It is not Russian music that is facing challenges,” he said at a news conference at China’s National Center for the Performing Arts. “It is the people who think they can stop Russian music.”The Ukraine war has badly damaged Russia’s cultural engine, which once sent ballet dancers from the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky to the world’s leading stages and brought Russian soloists, opera singers and conductors like Mr. Gergiev to leading concert halls and theaters in the United States and Europe.Now, with artists who are seen as too close to Mr. Putin being shunned in the West, Russia is working to shore up its image and rebuild its soft power elsewhere, strengthening cultural alliances with friendly nations and neighbors, including China, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Serbia, with mixed results.Mr. Gergiev’s tour came on the heels of a recent summit in Moscow between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Sputnik, via ReutersThe Bolshoi Ballet, the storied company whose name is synonymous with ballet, is considering two tours of China this year. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, an art institution, is working to open a sister branch in Serbia, after losing partnerships in the West because of the invasion. A St. Petersburg ballet company recently brought two works by the Russian choreographer Boris Eifman, “Anna Karenina” and “The Pygmalion Effect,” to Kazakhstan. Star Russian musicians who were once regulars in New York and Berlin, including the pianist Denis Matsuev, who was seen as close to Mr. Putin, are booking engagements instead in Dubai, Istanbul and Belgrade, Serbia, among other cities.China, with its legions of concertgoers and skepticism of Western ideals, has emerged as an attractive market for Russian artists aligned with Mr. Putin. While the two countries have long had cultural ties — Mr. Gergiev has been visiting the country for decades — the timing of his visit, coming a week after the meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, suggested Russia and China were eager for a fresh display of camaraderie as they work to counter American dominance.“Russia is looking for cultural exchanges wherever it can get them, just as it is looking for allies in technology, energy and the military,” Simon Morrison, a specialist in Russian music at Princeton University, said. “Putin is desperate to show that Russia still has friends.”Russia’s attempts to use culture to soften its image abroad face significant challenges, even in friendly countries, experts say, because of its continuing attacks on Ukraine.Classical music, dance, theater and visual art were “some of the last bridges between Russia and the West,” said Vera Ageeva, an international relations scholar at Sciences Po in France. But the disappearance of these cultural exports presents a “huge, incalculable loss for Russia and its soft power,” she said, which cannot be offset simply by expanding cultural ties with allies.Protesters outside an Anna Netrebko concert in Paris last spring.James Hill for The New York TimesAfter Russia invaded Ukraine, cultural institutions in the United States and Europe rushed to cut ties with Russian artists and institutions aligned with Mr. Putin, upending decades of cultural exchange that had endured even during the depths of the Cold War.The Bolshoi and Mariinsky faced cancellations in London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere; a popular program to broadcast Bolshoi performances into more than 1,700 movie theaters in 70 countries and territories was suspended. And several Russian stars with ties to Mr. Putin lost work in the West, including the soprano Anna Netrebko, Mr. Matsuev and Mr. Gergiev, who was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.While Mr. Putin has repeatedly portrayed Russia as a victim of a Western campaign to erase Russian culture and cancel great composers like Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, Russian works continue to be played throughout the United States and Europe.Mr. Gergiev, once one of the world’s busiest international conductors, has hunkered down in St. Petersburg, leading a packed schedule of performances at the Mariinsky, including classics like Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar.” Mr. Gergiev is the general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, which has been his base for decades, and which has expanded with funding and support from Mr. Putin.“I don’t find that my life has taken a turn for the worse,” he said in a recent interview with a Russian news outlet. “I find myself ready to be at home as much as possible.”Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.The Bolshoi, in a statement to The Times, said that overseas tours were necessary to maintain its image and reputation.“The fact that the Western world has been forced to deprive itself of the opportunity to see classical ballet the way Bolshoi is dancing saddens us,” the statement said. “But we ourselves continue to work actively and tour in those places where they are waiting for us.”Since the start of the war, performing has also become increasingly difficult for artists and institutions inside Russia because of a broad crackdown on free speech and expression by Mr. Putin. A “cultural front” movement has spread in recent months with the aim of mobilizing artists in support of the war.Several artists who have publicly expressed opposition to the war have been fired or forced to leave the country. The Bolshoi Ballet scrubbed the name of the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, once a close collaborator and a former artistic director, from its roster after he criticized the war and left Moscow shortly before he was to premiere a new work; the company recently called in replacements to help finish one of his dances.Russia is now looking to its allies to help prop up its flagship cultural institutions, just as it has turned to China and other countries to make up for lost business since its economy was abruptly severed from the West’s.Mr. Gergiev’s appearance in Beijing, which included four sold-out concerts, drew wide attention.The state-run news media hailed the visit as the “grand return” of the “toothpick conductor” (Mr. Gergiev has been known to conduct with a toothpick instead of a baton). Commentators seized the occasion to rail against the West for “politicizing art and venting their sentiment toward innocent people from Russia.”In Beijing, Mr. Gergiev said he felt he was “coming home.” He toured the Forbidden City, where he said he was reminded of China’s enduring cultural traditions, and visited old friends.At the news conference, Mr. Gergiev said the recent meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi would open the door to more frequent cultural exchange between Russia and China. He spoke about a patriotic Chinese composer who is a favorite of Mr. Xi — Xian Xinghai, who was stranded in the Soviet Union during World War II and died in Moscow. Mr. Gergiev said he hoped one day to lead an orchestra of young Russian and Chinese musicians.“These concerts,” he said of his appearance in Beijing, “mark the restart of international cultural exchange.”Milana Mazaeva contributed research from Washington, D.C., and Li You from Shanghai. More

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      Heinali Is Reconstructing Kyiv, One Synth Wave at a Time

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      “Kyiv Eternal,” by the composer and sound artist Heinali (real name Oleh Shpudeiko), submerges listeners in the sounds of the prewar Ukrainian capital.It’s disorienting: Again and again these past few weeks, I’ve been walking through New York and thinking I’m somewhere else. I’ll be strolling through Central Park, but the sounds I hear come from a park nine time zones away. In line at my local Whole Foods I’ll hear the cash registers of an Eastern European grocery store. Last week I was riding the subway to Harlem and the announcer called out the wrong line. “Next stop, Maidan Nezalezhnosti …”In my headphones, I’ve had an album on loop: “Kyiv Eternal,” a ravishing audioscape of the Ukrainian capital by the composer and electronic musician Heinali. Amid ambient washes of sound, Heinali, whose real name is Oleh Shpudeiko, integrates field recordings from across Kyiv: the horns of minibuses that ferry workers in from the suburbs, or the crowds in Landscape Alley, the open-air sculpture park overlooking the Dnipro River. Staticky street sounds from Shuliavka, a neighborhood that endured artillery strikes in the war’s first hours, commingle with quavering loops of electronic vibrations.The sounds are something of a time capsule. Shpudeiko captured them before Russia invaded; some of the recordings are more than a decade old. Intertwining those archival noises with electronic keyboards and instrumental lines, he has fabricated a citywide portrait of beautiful irresolution. “Kyiv Eternal” is no war diary. It’s an inward-looking musical conjuration of a city that’s partially vanished — to refugee outflows, to military curfews — and a city that is still, defiantly, standing.“I bought my first pocket Zoom sound recorder in 2011, I think, and the moment I bought it I started recording basically everything around me,” Shpudeiko told me when we caught up on a video call. With Alexey Shmurak, another sound artist, he attempted an “acoustic ecology of Kyiv”: collecting tones and noises that typified the capital’s audible life. They captured the unique phrasings of drivers of the capital’s private minibuses — which once constituted a hefty fraction of Kyiv transport, but began to fade in the era of Uber — hawking their destinations.“They would develop, with time, a very specific phrasing,” Shpudeiko said. “A melodic contour would suddenly appear. Like birds trying to capture the attention of a mate.” He incorporated those calls into the track “Rare Birds,” where soft electronic tremolos shimmer over drivers’ megaphones, as they announce their routes to Odesa or Vinnytsia.You hear more literal chirping on “Botanichnyi Sad” (“Botanical Garden”), whose stuttering synths intermingle with field recordings of birdsong from the A.V. Fomin Botanical Garden, which has stood in the center of the capital for nearly two centuries. Or there’s the exquisite track “Silpo,” named for a Ukrainian grocery store chain, whose jingling beat derives from the cash registers: a corporate carillon of high, sharp chimes, each ringing out over the composer’s muffled, crackling percussion line.“Kyiv Eternal” was released on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of the invasion. It inhabits a different sonic space from Heinali’s medieval-inspired synthesizer compositions, which he’s performed this year in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. (Ukrainian men require government permission to go abroad; Shpudeiko had approval for a residency in Cologne, Germany, where he recorded the new album.) Each track of “Kyiv Eternal” is largely stationary, without strong melodic variations. Some recall the ambient 1990s synth baths of Aphex Twin, others the recent synth-and-found-object compositions of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The effect is foggy, wistful, plangent, unresolved.Yet to a Kyivan listener, every track is studded with “ear-marks,” as Shpudeiko calls the aural signposts that orient you through the city as landmarks do for your eyes. The album is an ode to the capital, but not a mash note. “Kyiv isn’t the perfect city,” he said. “It’s full of ugliness and beauty as well. It’s a very interesting city, but it’s hard to love. But after leaving Ukraine, I felt it was a part of my identity, and I owe a lot to this city.”Since the war began, Heinali has performed in a Paris mansion, a Vienna nightclub and a Ukrainian bomb shelter. Oleksii KarpovychShpudeiko is a city boy, born in Kyiv in 1985. As a teenager he witnessed the 2004 Orange Revolution, which drew nonviolent protesters to the streets to protest a rigged election. Ten years later he took part in the Maidan Revolution, the massive democratic uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed president. Maidan didn’t just recast Ukraine’s political trajectory; it brought a cultural revolution too, especially in the capital.Before Maidan, Shpudeiko recalled, Kyiv had few promoters specializing in electronic, experimental music. “After 2014,” he said, “it was like an explosion.”Clubs sprang up in Podil, a low-lying bohemian neighborhood by the Dnipro River. There were digital radio stations like 20 Feet Radio, and electronic music labels rivaled only by Berlin’s. Kyiv became one of Europe’s prime party capitals — but the same venues that hosted club nights like Cxema also presented contemporary classical concerts, dance performances and art installations. “The audiences that would usually visit a rave would go to contemporary poetry readings,” Shpudeiko remembered.That post-Maidan class of DJs and sound artists — composers of art music and of club music, none too worried about the distinction — would become the first generation from post-independence Ukraine to win broad European esteem. But even as the city developed its reputation for cutting-edge nightlife, Shpudeiko started looking back: to medieval and early Renaissance music, whose strict, almost mathematical cadences reverberated with his own modular synthesizers.He fell particularly hard for Léonin and Pérotin, two of the first named composers, who in Paris in the late 12th and early 13th centuries pushed Western sacred music into polyphony. On his magnificent 2020 album “Madrigals,” Shpudeiko used custom synthesizer software to generate rich, independent yet intertwining melodies in the style of the Notre Dame school. Over that electronic polyphony, accompanists on period instruments, including the theorbo (a long-necked lute), improvised sometimes plangent, sometimes dissonant improvisations.He was at work on a second album of “generative polyphony” when the war came to Kyiv. (That album remains on hold, though a new composition, “Aves rubrae,” premiered on the website of the Museum of Modern Art last month.)“The thing is, I didn’t believe there would be a full-scale invasion,” he said. “All of my friends didn’t believe it either. But my girlfriend, she actually believed there would be war. I remember, on that night, we drank wine and we watched the last season of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ Four hours later we were woken up by explosions in Kyiv. And even at first, I thought that maybe it was some kind of mistake.”The couple’s first act was to evacuate their mothers. They were on the road for 50 hours straight, with Shpudeiko’s synthesizer between his legs. They tried and failed to cross the Polish border, unable to make it through the miles-long lines. Eventually they made it to the Hungarian border, where his relatives crossed safely. Shpudeiko took refuge in Lviv, in the relative safety of western Ukraine, where he and other displaced musicians played live-streamed concerts to raise money for the army and humanitarian aid.Last April — as Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, and discovered unspeakable atrocities exacted on civilians — Shpudeiko was in a bomb shelter, his synthesizer hooked up to Ethernet cables the length of a football field, playing his unfinished medieval album. Out of the basement, the beeps and honks of the synth danced around one another, just as the voices did in Paris some 900 years ago. The walls of the shelter, like those of the Gothic cathedral before it, reverberated with polyphonic music from a world beyond pain: not sacred, not quite, but certainly exalted.“What we did back then, it wasn’t just activism,” he says of those bomb-shelter concerts. “It was also about therapy. It was a way of preserving our artistic identity. When the full-scale invasion started, I think no one knew who they were anymore. I think everyone needed to perform some work to either reconstruct or preserve or change their identity.”Now the Ukrainian capital has another soundscape: the wailing bursts of the air raid siren that wakes you at night, the whir of the low-altitude cruise missile, the chain saw buzz of the slow-flying drone. The war haunts “Kyiv Eternal” nevertheless. The album opens with sounds of the Kyiv tramway, and, amid reverberant synths, we hear a loudspeaker calls out the stops: Zoolohichna Street, Lukianivska Square …. It’s line 14, and a gander at a Ukrainian transport app (for the trams still run on time in Kyiv) confirms that this streetcar is headed north, to Podil, where it will terminate at a grand square.On the album’s cover is a statue in that square, of Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, a Cossack military commander now adopted as the patron saint of the Ukrainian army. In peacetime, pedestrians would look up to see Konashevych on horseback, saber raised to the sky. On the cover of “Kyiv Eternal” he appears as he does today: sandbagged up his neck, a black tarp shrouding his head.The general is, for Shpudeiko, an unexpected cover model. “I’m not a nationalist, and all my music was always personal or abstract; it didn’t have any obvious national identity,” he told me. “I wanted to have something that would capture this feeling of wanting to embrace the living city. And these monuments: They are embraced by these sandbags, protecting them from harm.”Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko)“Kyiv Eternal”(Injazero) More

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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