Ukraine is a music country. She is presenting herself at the Young Euro Classic Festival with a program that initially features four Ukrainian composers. It is thanks to the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv that the evening in the Konzerthaus turned into a triumph. She is a performer of rank, with clear musical imagination and beautiful elegance of gesture. She assisted Kirill Petrenko, was musical director of the Graz Opera, was the first woman to conduct in Bayreuth and is now general music director in Bologna.
She initiated the founding of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. That happened in 2016. The idea was supported by German institutions, including the Federal Youth Orchestra. The aim is to support the most gifted musical talents in Ukraine between the ages of 12 and 22. And being a cultural ambassador. In this present of greatest threat, the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine comes to Young Euro Classic for the second time.
The evening opens with a brand new composition, Maria’s City by Zoltan Almashi, dedicated to commemorating the destruction of Mariupol: a lament for strings that slowly dies away. A chamber cantata by Oleh Kyva will be performed with mezzo-soprano Nataliia Kukhar. The experienced film composer shows himself in the stylistic synthesis of this music.
Though naturally unequal, all of the Ukrainian works are grounded in a love of melody. In an “Ikrainian Poem” (1997) for violin and orchestra by Yevgen Stankowitsch, Andrii Murza, a Ukrainian violinist from the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra, appears as a soloist. The composer has a famous teacher: Borys Liatoschynskyi. This late romantic comes from the Russian Empire and is considered the father of Ukrainian orchestral music. Listening again to his symphonic poem “Grazyna” about a story from the Middle Ages in Lithuania, recently performed in Berlin by the two youth orchestras of the Ukraine and Germany, confirms his characteristic sound. The eerily murmuring movement of the violas pierces the memory before the melody of the title heroine.
What Oksana Lyniv has already achieved with her orchestra is demonstrated by the guest selection of mature musicians with Dvorák’s symphony “From the New World”. An exceptional interpretation of flexible tempi, inspired concentration and amazing technique. The frenetic applause reaches exuberant proportions. Finally, the hall light is used to make it clear that the long evening is over.
