First time in Kyiv and Lviv

The name of this bass-baritone is not so much known among Ukrainian opera buffs in contrast to, say, Liudmyla Monastyrska or Viktoria Lukianets, who also work abroad but perform much more often in Ukraine. Yet it is thanks to Pavlo Hunka that many foreigners discovered the song heritage of Ukrainian composers.

For 35 years in a row, the singer has been collecting, singing, recording, and popularizing Ukrainian songs in various countries as part of the project “Ukrainian Classical Artistic Singing” which he is going to present for the first time in Kyiv and Lviv in June this year.

You have quite an ambitious intention to record all songs by Ukrainian authors. Why have you taken up this project and what do you mean by “all”?

“First of all, I’d like to distinguish between Ukrainian classical songs (I call them ‘artistic songs’) and Ukrainian folk songs arranged for choir or voice with piano. Ukrainians often confuse them. We took original authors’ compositions only. For a folk song is a song for us and sung by us. It is a splendid song, but in a vast majority of cases it cannot match a classical song in complexity, diversity of shades, and depth. It is through classics that we must show the world our song.

“As of today, we’ve managed to collect over 1,100 songs out of about 1,300, which accounts for 1/12 of our musical culture. There are three directions in this project: the first – to record, the second – to popularize these songs in the world, and the third – to set up a worldwide library on our website, where everybody could take one song or another free of charge. There already are 17 CDs with 352 recorded songs. The discs include the songs’ lyrics in the Ukrainian, English, French, and German languages, as well as short comments on them.

“Why have I taken this up? Because very few people know about this genre in our culture and still fewer people evince interest in it. I have managed to gather them all from all the nooks of the world, not only in Ukraine, – from libraries and private collections. As a singer (I’ve been singing for 37 years now, the last three years in Germany), I am aware of the vigor these songs carry to people all over the world. Everybody knows about the German song, the Lied. I think we also have a tremendous creative treasure, which Ukrainians themselves do not know. Meanwhile, we are second best in the world, as far as the number of artistic songs is concerned. While we have over 1,000 of them, Germany has over 5,000. Russia has fewer, and France still fewer. We must be proud and show the world that we are a very refined and cultured nation.”

What are the chronological bounds of the chosen songs?

“The first song was composed in 1868. It is ‘Oh, I’m Alone’ by Mykola Lysenko. We have already recorded it. Lysenko has about six hours of music – it is very much, and he has a total of 124 songs that account for 1/6 of his heritage. We recorded 42 songs by Kyrylo Stetsenko in 2006. So we have already recorded songs by Mykola Lysenko, Yakiv Stepovy, Kyrylo Stetsenko, and the Galician composers Denys Sichynsky, Stanislav Liudkevych, Stefania Turkevych, and Vasyl Barvinsky. Turkevych was the first female composer in the history of Ukraine. She took classes from Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin, moved to and stayed on in Britain in the 1950s. We had the privilege to see her daughter who presented us with all her artworks. We also recorded her. It is an extraordinary event because there are many female composers in Ukraine now, while she was the first.”

Do you plan to sing songs by contemporary Ukrainian composers?

“Yes. I was invited this year to give a solo recital at the National Philharmonic Society of Ukraine on June 5, and I’ll give a concert in Lviv on June 9. In this program, I will sing the songs Oleksandr Yakovchuk composed five years ago. It is a cycle of Shakespeare’s 12 sonnets translated by Ostap Tarnavsky. Yakovchuk did a very interesting musical job. I also like, for example, Bohdana Froliak’s songs. Incidentally, she is writing for me a cycle of songs to words from Ukrainian poets. I hope I will sing this cycle.”

Do you encourage your foreign colleagues to sing Ukrainian songs?

“Naturally, it is very important that foreign, not Ukrainian, singers sing and thus spread these songs in the world. As a matter of fact, all the participants in this project, except for me, are not Ukrainians. None of them can speak Ukrainian, but they sing superbly. I teach them to pronounce, but I still try to make sure that they interpret this music the way they themselves understand and feel it. I asked them not to google for Lysenko or Shevchenko, for they don’t need to know this. We give them the score and the text and explain what this text means, and that’s all. If necessary, we tell them something from the history of these works, and nothing more. Sometimes their first reaction was: ‘Why don’t we know this repertory?’ So these singers begin to include these songs into their repertory and sing them on the world’s stages. The 16 soloists we cooperate with are already singing these songs outside this project.”

Where have you given solo concerts with Ukrainian songs yet?

“In Toronto, Harvard, Munich, Boston, New York, and other cities. But, for example, one Canadian baritone always sings our repertory, and his programs feature not only Schumann and Schubert, but also Lysenko and Stetsenko. In other words, these songs gradually begin to be where they should be.”

Do foreign singers note a specific melos of Ukrainian songs?

“Obviously, Ukrainian music has something of its own. But, like all the musical spheres, these songs are under the influence of other cultures. For example, we can hear Turkish, Indian, and Chinese intonations in Lysenko’s songs. I like some influences of Western and Eastern Europe very much, for this means that Ukrainians are a European nation. And almost all the composers we have recorded studied in the West: Liudkevych in Vienna and Prague, Lysenko in Leipzig, and Turkevych in Berlin and Vienna.”

Do you observe the purity of a genre? In other words, is it only the songs for voice and piano?

“Yes, but there are also songs with a violin, violoncello (for example, in the case of Stetsenko), and flute accompaniment. We still don’t have any orchestrated cycles of Ukrainian songs, while the Russians, Frenchmen, and Germans do. We must correct this as soon as possible.

“Ukraine must see how rich it is. For I can see, mingling with students and even experienced opera singers, that they don’t know this repertory – they could not name more than five songs by Ukrainian composers. We are not Russians and we have our own composers, so we can sing both things. I can still feel the influence of the former USSR era, when music by Russian composers was being ‘pushed through’ all the way round, but very much has changed in the past 25 years. And our contribution is an attempt to open the whole world’s eyes to Ukrainian songs.”