‘Resilience’ became the term of choice during COVID, showing our ability to live through the deadliest epidemic in memory and thrive. In the same way, the word has been applied to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia’s invasion. As the country Russia thought it could overcome in 3 days reaches 1,650 days under siege, Resilience has become one of its defining characteristics.
Solomiya Ivakhiv
In this fashion, violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv brings us a recording of Ukrainian music from living and lesser-known Ukrainian composers. The recording was made in Lviv under the constant threat of Russian missile attacks.
Victoria Vita Polevá
Victoria Vita Polevá: Bucha. Lacrimosa (Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin; Lviv International Symphony Orchestra; Roman Kreslenko, cond.)
The most striking piece on the recording is the opening, Victoria Vita Polevá’s searing lament, Bucha. Lacrimosa was written in 2022 in direct response to a brutal massacre in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha as Russian troops were withdrawing. The lament is in 3 parts, starting with a solo violin representing the souls rising to their eternal rest. Percussion is omnipresent as a threatening force that culminates in the middle section. In the end, the violin motif returns but without any idea of comfort or resolution. It’s left to the woodblocks for their final dry statement on the future.
Hanna Havrylets, 2019
Hanna Havrylets composed Ex Libris in 1993 for poet and violinist Sofia Maidanska to perform on a tour of North America. The suite of four movements ‘responds to Maidanska’s poetry with fantasies on traditional themes marked by their modal harmony, fusing art and folk music techniques of repetition and ornamentation rather than development’.
Bohdan Kryvopust
Bohdan Kryvopust is represented by two pieces composed in 2024. On the River commemorates the protestors killed in Kyiv’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) during the demonstrations in January and February 2014 when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected the idea of closer ties to the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia. Much as in Polevá’s lament, the violin is left to pick up the pieces but doesn’t bring the work to a calm resolution.
His Ukrainian Suite was commissioned by the Ukrainian Institute of America and Bohdan Gerulak, in memory of his late wife, the journalist and translator Marta Skorupsky. At its core is the folk song Oh, Wondrous Birth, which tells the origin story of Ukraine and Crimea as the land of ancient Scythia. The second movement recognised the beauty and headstrong temperament of women from the Hutsul region in western Ukraine (and the home region of our violinist). The final movement, When I Got My Draft Notice, takes its title from another song from western Ukraine, but one that feels more relevant now.
Osyp Zalesky
Bohdana Frolyak, 2017
An older-generation composer, Osyp Zalesky (1892–1984) built his career in the US after training at the conservatoire in Lviv and studying with Guido Adler in Vienna. He worked in Buffalo, New York, and founded its local Ukrainian Music Institute. Bohdana Frolyak arranged his part-song Autumn Song for violin and orchestra.
Ihor Sonevytsky
Bohdana Frolyak’s own Nocturne on the recording comes from a suite for cello and piano she wrote in 2008 in memory of the composer Ihor Sonevytsky, commissioned by his widow Natalia Palidvor. The bittersweet melody and its major/minor-switching harmony have been reworked for violin and orchestra.
Roman Prydatkevych
Roman Prydatkevych’s Ukrainian Rhapsody No. 1 is very much in the tradition of late-Romantic violin music; Bohdana Frolyak’s modern arrangement gives it a fresh twist, calling on composers from Korngold to John Williams to create a work with both concert and filmic imagery.
Yuriy Shevchenko
As an encore, Solomiya Ivakhiv plays the arrangement of Ukraine’s national anthem by Yuriy Shevchenko, completed shortly before the composer’s death from COVID in 2022.
Yuriy Shevchenko: We Do Exist! (We Are!), Paraphrase on the melody of the National Anthem of Ukraine by M. Verbytskyi (Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin; Lviv International Symphony Orchestra; Roman Kreslenko, cond.)
Again and again, the music and composers on this recording reinforce Ukraine’s place in music: connected to the world, yet with its own unique sound and connection to its folk and people. Many of these composers have found their homes in other countries, but still maintain their links to their homeland. This recording showcases not only Solomiya Ivakhiv’s violin playing but also the beautiful music from home and the many composers who have helped define it.
Music of Resilience
Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin
With the Academic Symphony Orchestra & INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Roman Kreslenko and Serhii Khorovets
Naxos 8.579191
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