Listen to things Ukrainian!

The name of the Ukrainian violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv, a concertmaster of the symphony orchestra at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, is well known in the US.

Solomiya is the first Ukrainian graduate of this elitist musical institution to hold this position in the institute’s 90-year-long history. She has been Artistic Director of Music at the Institute (MATI) Concert Series in New York City in the past few years. The violinist also teaches – she is Professor of Violin and Viola and Head of Strings at the University of Connecticut. Solomiya actively tours Europe, China, Canada, and Ukraine. This year she had the honor of opening the 26th International Virtuosos Festival of Music Art in her native Lviv. The Lviv Philharmonic’s Symphony Orchestra was conducted by the Ukrainian American musician Theodore Kuchar. Incidentally, Ivakhiv donates all the Ukrainian tour proceeds to meet the ATO needs.

In an artistic tandem with the Ukrainian pianist Angelina Gadeliya, Solomiya has recorded an album, “Journey to Freedom: a Century of Ukrainian Classical Music for Violin and Piano.”

Formed in 2006, the Ivakhiv-Gadeliya duet has won wide recognition from audiences both in the Ukrainian diaspora and among representatives of other peoples.

The “Journey to Freedom” album, which consists of two disks, was released by the prestigious US sound recording companies Labor Records and NAXOS. The recording at New York’s famous American Academy of Arts and Letters was made by Judith Sherman, a four times Grammy winner. NAXOS distributed the disk among 9,000 libraries worldwide. Incidentally, iTimes has rated “Journey to Freedom” as fourth best new album of classical music.

Solomiya said in an interview that the world is now displaying a keen interest in Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. As a matter of fact, the disk’s goal is to show to the world a more refined, intellectual, and multifarious layer of Ukrainian culture – the best examples of neo-romantic, expressive contemporary, neo-folkloric, and postmodern trends in the art of music. This includes works by eight composers: Viktor Kosenko, Myroslav Skoryk, Ivan Karabyts, Borys Liatoshynsky, Oleksandr Shchetynsky, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Yevhen Stankovych, and Bohdan Kryvopust. Contrary to the pressure of the Soviet totalitarian system and instructions to follow the pattern, these composers managed to find their voice and an original artistic manner.

The disk entries were not chosen at random. All of these compositions are certain stages of the violinist’s artistic career. For example, “Allegro” and “Dance” from Skoryk’s Hutsul Triptych (1964) are of special importance for Solomiya, for this maestro comes from Lviv, as she does, and their families have known each other for years. Stankovych composed “The Touch of an Angel” as a special tribute to Ivakhiv in 2013. The work was commissioned by the Ukrainian Institute of America to mark the 25th anniversary of the MATI Concert Series. The composer explained that he had expressed in this piece the memories of his troubled childhood and World War Two agonies. The piece was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2013. Kosenko’s “Dreams” (1919) was the first piece Solomiya played on stage at the age of eight. Liatoshynsky’s “Sonata” (1926) made a deep impression on the violinist by its subtlety or, to be more exact, Europeanness.

The music of “Capriccio” (2014) by Kryvopust, Solomiya’s colleague and music manager, reflects the Maidan events very well. The piece is dedicated to Ivakhiv, and she first played it in June 2014 in Kyiv with the Kyivska Kamerata orchestra conducted by Valerii Matiukhin. The composer wrote the “Capriccio” version for violin and piano in 2015.

Shchetynsky’s fantasy “An Episode in the Life of a Poet” (2014) attracted the violinist with the meditative nature of music in the contemporary technique of minimalism, a correlation of the diverse gradations of sound and silence, muted dynamics, minor fluctuations of intonation, and variations in rhythm and timbre. As the composer himself points out, this opus is based on the music of his opera An Interrupted Message, whose protagonist is Taras Shevchenko, a genius of Ukrainian poetry and painting. American audiences first heard this fantasy at the recital that marked the 200th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth at Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Concert Hall (New York) in December 2014.

The “Post-Scriptum” sonata by Sylvestrov (1990), written in the style of postmodernism, is quite difficult to perform. This is especially true of an extremely changeable scale of dynamic shades. In the composer’s view, this difficulty in his works is easy to overcome, for he gives it against the backdrop of simple metro-rhythmic structures. Besides, the composer gave some very valuable advice after hearing the sonata by Skype.

The idea of the CD is to integrate and combine the characteristic cultural features of Ukraine’s various regions, for Shchetynsky is from Kharkiv, Karabyts from the Donbas, Kryvopust from Zaporizhia, Liatoshynsky and Sylvestrov from Kyiv, Kosenko from Zhytomyr, Skoryk from Lviv, and Stankovych from Transcarpathia. This CD represents all of Ukraine in an almost centennial time span – from 1919 to 2014. This is why it is titled “Journey to Freedom: a Century of Ukrainian Classical Music for Violin and Piano.” Ukrainians from various nooks of the world took part in making the disk. The blurbs were written by Virko Balei, a composer who popularized Ukrainian music in America in the “iron curtain” era and used to come to the USSR to come into personal contact with Ukrainian musicians. The cover reproduces the picture Taking Flight by the Lviv-based artist Solomiya Kohut. It shows two birds that want to fly up to freedom. Lev Rakovsky, a Ukrainian American, made the design, in which he used the ornamentation of Ukraine’s various regions, thus repeating the idea of the disk’s musical content.