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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

A Concert Twelve Years Late

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

Ukrainian pianist Mykola Suk has lived in New York for about eight years, but has regularly toured Ukraine, mainly to popularize music which is little known or seldom performed. Last year, he visited Kyiv and Chernihiv to play Liszt’s “Damnation,” practically unknown in Ukraine. This time he came to present a piano version of Beethoven’s violin concerto.

“Beethoven was commissioned to write this version by Muzio Clementi, so both the violin and piano concertos were published together. The violin concerto is performed quite often, but few know the piano one,” says Mykola Suk.

Incidentally, he planned to perform it at the Beethoven Festival scheduled for 1986, which never took place because of Chornobyl. This time he did, 12 years later, together with the Philharmonic and the local music school’s symphony orchestra. Music lovers in Kyiv will hear it before long, too.

Mykola Suk is the Artistic Director of the Ukrainian Institute of America. He carried out yet another project there this year. A concert called “The Ukrainian Element in World Music,” aroused considerable interest in the ethnic community and elsewhere in the United States.

“I cherished this idea for a long time and it finally came true,” he says. “There is a lot of music in the world which is not always identified as Ukrainian. In the first program we offered two pieces from the Gogol Suite written by US composer LeFleur commissioned by the Boston Symphony (previously it was performed as a violin and piano concerto, using a Xerox copy of the original music in which the violin part was only indicated), Rachmaninoff’s romances to Shevchenko lyrics (sung by Oksana Krovytska, Hummel’s flute, cello, and piano trio based on the Ukrainian song “A Cossack Went Over the Danube,” and Beethoven and Leontovych string quartets.”

According to Mr. Suk, its success could only encourage one to continue, “the more so that it won’t be difficult to select pieces for the second program.”

He plans to visit Kyiv again come September, to hold a master class at the Gliere Music School.

 

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