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    ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Review: Ukrainian City Under Siege

    While the Ukrainian city was under siege by Russian forces, a team of journalists recorded the brutal war, resulting in this essential documentary.Everyone else was gone: the authorities, the aid workers, the other journalists too. One week into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was still in the port city of Mariupol, watching from a high floor of a hospital as a tank emblazoned with a white Z pulled up alongside. Smoke kept rising, bitter and black, from the shelled housing blocks a short distance away. There was no way out. Mariupol was surrounded now. Chernov kept his cameras rolling.“20 Days in Mariupol,” a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol. The A.P. journalists were the last from an international news organization in the city, and for three weeks they documented pregnant women fleeing a bombed maternity hospital, the elderly and the displaced boiling snow to obtain fresh water, the freshly dug ditches where children’s corpses were laid to rest. The reporting would win Chernov, along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, but because internet connections were sparse to absent in the city, Chernov could only transmit a small fraction of his footage during the siege. It all comes out in “20 Days in Mariupol,” in which the battle to survive in southeast Ukraine becomes entwined with the struggle to tell the world what’s happening.This film is very hard to watch, and so it should be, though its episodic structure makes it somewhat easier to endure: Day 1 through Day 20, one at a time, from the first bombs to the team’s flight to safety. On the morning of Feb. 24, Chernov and his colleagues head toward Mariupol, a city of half a million people on the Sea of Azov, and drive by Ukrainian military bases whose antiaircraft systems are burning — the first Russian targets, to prepare the path of their war planes. Many residents doubted the violence would reach Mariupol, and evacuation trains were leaving the city half-empty. Now we follow them into improvised shelters: a cold cellar, a CrossFit gym. “I don’t want to die,” says one young boy. “I wish it would all end soon.”But by Day 4 the fighter jets are overhead, and Chernov is stationed at one of Mariupol’s remaining open hospitals, about a mile from the front line on the edge of the city. He’s there when an ambulance rushes up, and paramedics perform C.P.R. on a 4-year-old girl named Evangelina, severely injured after a Russian shell landed near her home. The medics race her to the modest emergency room, where her blood pools on the floor as they try, and fail, to resuscitate her. (Chernov blurs out her face here, though The A.P. published uncensored images at the time.) “Keep filming,” the head doctor insists — and a minute later, we see the same footage of the doctors at work in grainy reproduction on an MSNBC broadcast and Britain’s ITV News.This blending of high- and low-resolution video registers is a critical tool of Chernov and his editor, Michelle Mizner of “Frontline,” who in many chapters of “20 Days in Mariupol” suture together three kinds of imagery. First comes drone footage of the city — its Khrushchev-era housing blocks, its huge Azovstal steel plant — whose devastation becomes more visible as winter passes to spring. Then follows unique documentation of the war’s early atrocities, shot on high-definition video, but often askew or rocky as Chernov runs after a hospital gurney or flees from the aim of snipers. Finally, at the end of many days, the footage repeats as broadcasts on CBS News, France 24, Deutsche Welle and other AP clients.Even if they feel a touch self-congratulatory, these rebroadcasts underscore two things: the rarity of Chernov’s footage, and the immense challenge of getting it out of Mariupol. The port city’s internet is basically gone by Day 11, when the Russians blockade it from all three sides, and the A.P. journalists risk their lives to hunt for wireless connections after curfew. And there is the matter of Chernov’s nationality. Though he has covered wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, he is a native of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and as he whispers at the start of the film, “I have no illusions about what will happen to us if we are caught.”Day 20 comes, and with it a harrowing drive past a dozen Russian checkpoints, with the journalists hiding cameras and hard drives under the seats. One day later, on March 16, 2022, Russian forces bomb the city’s Drama Theater, where hundreds of adults and children have taken shelter. This documentary is more, therefore, than a unique record of particular crimes; it’s a synecdoche for a much larger atrocity, and a model of how we discover the larger truth of war in images of one hospital, one grave, one child.“With every new war, the ethics of war photography are debated again,” regretted the Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko in a recent essay on our self-serving doubt of depictions of horror, made acuter through Russia’s parallel disinformation campaigns. The only moral question before us is whether we take these images seriously, or whether, with a skepticism also known as cowardice, we turn away.20 Days in MariupolNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    A Finnish Official Plays the Cello to Support Ukraine, Irking Russia

    Anders Adlercreutz’s recording of a patriotic Ukrainian song was widely circulated online, and prompted a response from Moscow.Anders Adlercreutz, Finland’s minister for European affairs, has long been a critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, denouncing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for leading a “crazy war” and calling on Western governments to send tanks to Kyiv.On Sunday, Mr. Adlercreutz tried a different tactic: he posted a video of himself on social media playing a patriotic Ukrainian song on the cello to mark the conflict’s 500th day. The video also shows images of bombed buildings, juxtaposed with phrases like “unspeakable aggression,” as well as hopeful symbols like sunflower fields and a dove in flight.500 days of unprovoked aggression, countless war crimes, lost futures – but also of encouraging success. Ukraine fights for its independence, but also for Europe’s. Finland stands by you, today and tomorrow.В пам’ять про тих, хто віддав своє життя за свободу. pic.twitter.com/P5D9WpPH39— Anders Adlercreutz (@adleande) July 9, 2023
    “I wanted to provide comfort to Ukrainians here in Finland and in other countries,” Mr. Adlercreutz said in an interview, “and to make clear that they are not ignored, and their culture, their music and their language is not forgotten.”To his surprise, the video garnered more than a million views across a variety of platforms, and he received a flood of comments from Ukrainians moved by the performance.Russian officials tried to portray the video as part of an effort by Western countries to sway public opinion ahead of a NATO meeting this week that was attended by President Biden and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. (Finland became the alliance’s 31st member state in April, a strategic defeat for Mr. Putin.)In a television appearance this week, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, denounced the NATO meeting as a “colorful performance” that was “in the worst traditions of Western manipulation,” according to Russian news reports. She went on to say that “Finnish government ministers are recording cello solos in support of Ukraine.” Russia has in recent months been highly critical of Finland for joining NATO, saying it has “forfeited its independence.”The video features the Ukrainian song “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” written during World War I, which has long been associated with Ukraine’s fight for independence.Since the invasion, the song has emerged as a popular anthem for the Ukrainian cause. A few days into the war, the Ukrainian musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk, from the band Boombox, recorded a defiant rendition with a rifle slung across his chest.Last year, Pink Floyd released a reworked version of the song, featuring Mr. Khlyvnyuk, to raise money for the people of Ukraine, its first new track in almost three decades.Since the invasion, Ukrainians have used music to bring attention to suffering, following in a tradition of impromptu performances by ordinary citizens in war zones, in the Balkans, Syria and elsewhere. A cellist last year performed Bach in the center of a deserted street in Kharkiv, with the blown-out windows of the regional police headquarters behind him.Mr. Adlercreutz, who began studying cello as an 11-year-old, said he had been inspired by Ukrainian musicians, including Mr. Khlyvnyuk. He recorded “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow” in February at the Parliament House in Helsinki, playing different musical lines that he later mixed together.He said it was important to use culture to bring attention to Ukraine.“I want to send the message to Ukrainians that we see you, we recognize you, we support you, and we don’t forget where you are coming from and what you are going through,” he said. “We can easily forget the war, but this is a message that we really have to repeat.” More

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    A Russian Pianist Speaks Out Against the War From Home

    Polina Osetinskaya, a critic of the invasion who has stayed in Moscow even as the government cracks down on dissent, will play a Baroque program in New York.When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the pianist Polina Osetinskaya, who lives in Moscow, was distraught. She took to social media to describe a sense of “horror, shame and disgust,” and expressed solidarity with Ukraine, where she had often performed.But unlike many artists, activists and intellectuals, Osetinskaya, 47, decided to remain in Russia, where she lives with her three children, even as the Kremlin cracked down on free expression and made clear that any contradiction of the government’s statements on the invasion could be treated as a crime. She has faced consequences for her views — some concerts at state-run halls have been canceled, while others have been interrupted by the authorities.Osetinskaya, who was born in Moscow, says her international career has also suffered because of her Russian identity. She lost some overseas engagements after the invasion, she says, because presenters were nervous about featuring Russian citizens. As a result, she says that she often feels caught in the middle: seen suspiciously both inside and outside her country.Osetinskaya will perform a program of Bach, Handel, Purcell and Rameau at the 92nd Street Y in New York on Saturday, part of a five-city tour organized by the Cherry Orchard Festival, which promotes global cultural exchange. The program explores Baroque masterpieces featured in movies like “The Godfather” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”In between concerts and rehearsals this week, she discussed her opposition to the war, the role of music in healing and her decision to remain in Moscow. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You’ve made the difficult decision to stay in Russia even as you criticize the war. Why have you continued to speak out?This is a huge tragedy that is happening in my soul every day. Some of my friends tell me, “Take this war out of your heart, it’s not your problem.” I think it’s our problem. A lot of us, in the beginning, didn’t think it would turn out this way. Being Russian now is kind of like being crucified in the eyes of a lot of people. But I know that there are Russians who are truly against the war and against what is happening.I want people to know that there are a lot of people like this in Russia. And they’ve been put in prison for their views, or for their likes on Facebook. And they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost their freedom just for openly expressing their opinions. I want people to know that there are a lot of good Russians, if I may say so.“I was born in 1975 and remember the repression that was in the Soviet Union. And I have a feeling like I’m back in this time.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesAre you concerned about your own safety?I was born in 1975 and remember the repression that was in the Soviet Union. And I have a feeling like I’m back in this time. And that’s what makes me so sad. We have so many opportunities to grow, to be a part of a world community, and instead we’re still repeating our own story, and it’s not the best pages of our story.Right now, I’m playing private concerts in Moscow because big halls are closed for me. I truly hope that I won’t be put in jail for my views and opinions. Every time I talk openly about my feelings, I’m being watched. All I need now is to be able to work, to feed my children, and not to be afraid that I might be a political prisoner.In March, the authorities in Moscow interrupted a concert in which you and several other artists were playing works by Shostakovich and Mieczysław Weinberg.The police ran into the concert hall in the middle of the performance, and they said they got a call that there was a bomb inside. And they asked everyone to to leave. And everybody stepped out onto the rainy street, and the police went inside with the bomb-sniffing dogs. And the audience stayed with me — there under the rain — and nobody left. And when finally the police hadn’t found any bombs, obviously, we got back to the hall and we continued the concert.How did that experience make you feel?At that moment, I was completely broken because I had the feeling that I had been struggling for months for the possibility to play, and it was interrupted. But I remembered the people who have been thanking me for not leaving Russia. People write me letters telling me that they don’t feel abandoned because I’m here. Many of the artists have left.Did you have any hesitations about speaking out when the war first started?On the first day of the war, I woke up at 7 a.m. because I was making my children breakfast and taking them to school. And I opened my eyes and I saw a post on Facebook by my friend that said, “Oh God, No! No!” I immediately understood what was going on. I just couldn’t believe it was happening. I never had the idea that I could keep silent. I had to scream.What do you hope audiences will take away from your tour in the United States this week?Baroque music very much suits our time because it has so much drama, so much tragedy, so much power, so much consolation at the same time. It sounds like it was written just now. The music that I am playing makes us look into ourselves, feel empathy to anyone who is suffering right now, including ourselves, and gives us hope. That’s what we need probably most right now. When the war started, this program made so much sense. I want as many people as possible to hear this music.Do you think your words and music can have an impact?I feel a little bit useless. I have no power to stop the war. I have no power to do anything to change things. But playing music and touching the keyboard — that’s the only thing I can do to solve my own pain and to solve other people’s pain.It’s dangerous to say this right now, but I have to say that I love Russia. I can separate Russia — my country, my homeland, the beautiful people who live there — from the government and from the people who are making decisions. I can tell one from the other, but it seems to me that nobody else can.Life is not just black and white like my keyboard. It has a lot of colors and it has a lot of shades. We should remember people’s feelings and souls. More

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    At Eurovision, Ukrainians Find Community Far From Home

    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

    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

    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

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

    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