Music that heals souls

For 10 years already, soloists of the theater’s ballet company, invited artists and bands, and musicians of the Symphony Orchestra, directed by Herman Makarenko, have been holding holiday performances on St. Nicholas Day for parentless children as well as people who serve disadvantaged kids with all their hearts, that is, doctors and social workers. Invitations for this year’s show were sent to cadets of Kyiv-based Ivan Bohun Military Lyceum and military academies, scientists, doctors of military hospitals, and soldiers who had returned from the anti-terrorist operation area.

Maestro Makarenko is famous as an “ambassador of the Ukrainian culture.” He is known to music lovers as creative director of Strauss concerts as well as New Year and spring concerts, which he holds at the National Opera. Programs of these evenings are always interesting and full of surprises. The 10th anniversary of St. Nicholas Day charity concerts coincided this year with the 50th anniversary of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine’s Medvid Scientific Center of Preventive Toxicology, Food and Chemical Safety, which has sponsored the charity events since they started. The program was dominated by high music.

According to Makarenko, who was the scriptwriter of the show, the program was intended “to present history of Ukraine in music, showing the country on equal terms with the world, confidently integrated into the global musical context, and rich in melodic talents.” The show saw best symphonic miniatures, vocal, opera and ballet pieces of times old and new, composed by Niccolo Paganini and Myroslav Skoryk, Benjamin Britten and Yevhen Adamtsevych, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Wagner and Vasyl Vizniuk, Ludwig van Beethoven and Imre Kalman, Yurii Shevchenko and Johann Sebastian Bach, Mykola Leontovych, Johann Strauss and others. The concert involved children’s choirs of Zabava and Credo studios, directed by Bohdan Plish.

Unusually, the concert saw stringed instruments made by famous Ukrainian artist Florian Yuriev participating in it as if they were performers in their own right. Yuriev devoted all his life to creating violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and kobzas, and he gave them not only melodic souls, but names and faces as well. As part of the project “The Millennium of the Ukrainian Violin: From Frescoes in St. Sophia Cathedral to Florian Yuriev’s String Ensemble,” the listeners heard the sounds of violins “Tchaikovsky” and “Magic Lybid,” and kobza “Taras the Bard.”