The final chord of the cycle “All symphonies by Borys Liatoshynsky”

The Day has many times told about the ambitious creative project of maestro Volodymyr Sirenko, who has for the first time performed the entire symphonic oeuvre of the Ukrainian classic. The composer created his Fourth and Fifth symphonies in the 1960s, a period of changes, when the struggle of thoughts and the processes of renewal of language and genre guidelines started. “Borys Liatoshynsky seemed to belong to another planet,” renowned composer Valentyn Sylvestrov, who along with Hadiatsky, Stankovych, and Karabyts was among the students of the renowned master in the Kyiv Conservatory of those glorious years. Both last symphonies by Liatoshynsky are now classic of modern Ukrainian music culture, its highest achievement.

“The first impression the audience gets when listening to the Fourth symphony: it is simply astonishing!” composer Poliovy resumed after the first performance. “This magnificent creation is so innovative, uncommon, and mysterious that it seems the high mountain, which is being offered for the audience to ascend.”

It will be reminded that the first performance of the work conducted by the author himself took place in 1965 in Kyiv and evoked essential exaltation. “This is a magnificent power of thought, the feeling of reliability and ingeniousness of the author’s thinking, his ability to penetrate into the highest summits of human spirit, and tell things which cannot be expressed,” said the reviews in the lobby of the National Philharmonic Society, and fortunately, 47 years later our thoughts and statements about this music have only deepened. The brilliant performance of the Fourth symphony proved that the concept of the work seems to “voice the wise confession of the Ukrainian artist, his great life experience via the prism of the idea of a person and the world, a subject and object.” It is not without a reason that it uses the material of the composer’s earlier works created in the 1920s. The symphony sounded as an integral and accomplished philosophical concept of subject’s cognizing of the objective world where collision, conflict-explosive element, tragedy combined with the candidness of thought, and depth of thinking go along. Asserting the genre of this psychological symphony, a tragedy, Liatoshynsky creates in the vein of the principles of great symphony authors of the 20th century: Dmitry Shostakovich, Witold Lutoslawski, Karol Szymanowski, the artists who would depict in the music confessions the painful contradictions of their time.

The Fifth symphony of the great Ukrainian artist (with the program title, Slavonic) has for a long time been interpreted as a symphony of Slavonic unity. This was fueled by the processes in the after-war period, when relations among the Slavonic peoples brisked up. For after the bloody events of the World War II, including the attempts to destroy the Slavonic ethnos, the close ties between the Slavs literary blossomed, and the cultural contacts became more vivid. The problems of Slavic studies got a further research, and the role of Slavonic peoples on the European and world historical context received scientific grounding. We can observe the same trend in the creative work of Maksym Rylsky, Pavlo Tychyna, Volodymyr Sosiura, and other Ukrainian artists.

The work’s themes are based on the folk melodies, Ukrainian, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. Performed by the orchestra as the conductor intended, the Fifth symphony sounded not simply as a magnificent song of the Slavonic fraternity. Conductor Volodymyr Sirenko penetrated the idea of the score so deeply that the audience heard almost a new work – conflict, tense, and explosive.

The audience felt that the composer, as well as the musicians, not only admired the Slavonic beauty. The Slavonic nature is presented like a living history and tragic modern times in a constant dynamic establishing. The epic, folk images of the work turned out to be full of passionate tension, and efficient struggle. So, the project of the famed company of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine entitled “All symphonies by Borys Liatoshynsky,” season 2011-12, has been successfully accomplished. The composer’s five symphonies is the maestro’s confession full of powerful subjective incentive combined with the leitmotif of his epoch, its stormy and tragic being, this is a cry and suffering, dithyrambs and admiration – in a word this is a question and response.

We, Ukrainians, are proud that we have great Borys Liatoshynsky, who along with Oleksandr Dovzhenko brought our culture to the planetary level of acute collisions of his time, with the innovation language of expressing the entire dramatic effect of the ethic-psychological concepts of our contemporary.