Prominent Ukrainian composer celebrates 60th birthday
The name of Yevhen Stankovych is inseparably linked to the most expressive modern Ukrainian compositions. As a rule, his works are a synthesis of avant-garde, classical, and folk elements. They are dramatically eloquent, with a definite lyrical touch. Stankovych ranks among Ukraine’s most popular composers, his compositions are performed in many countries, and his sixtieth birthday was marked in all regions of Ukraine. The festivities started in his native Zakarpattia and the National Opera in Kyiv staged his ballet The Vikings (choreography by Viktor Lytvynov), followed on September 20 by his Viola Concerto (soloist: Daniel Rajskin, Holland), Pastoral Symphony (Eduard Idelchuk, Russia), Suite from the ballet Christmas Eve performed by the national symphony orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Volodymyr Sirenko. The Lysenko Hall of Columns of the capital’s Philharmonic Society was also part of the celebrations, offering his religious compositions and the choral version of the folk opera The Flower of the Fern. Among the participants in the musical soiree were the Revutsky Choir and Pavana Women’s Choir. Two concerts were staged by his students and colleagues at the composer’s alma mater, Ukraine’s National Academy of Music, where he has taught for over a decade. The program included seven Stankovych symphonies.
The maestro and his devotees received a present, his personal website, www.stankovych.org.ua. A series of CDs with his compositions are to be released shortly, along with a documentary dedicated to his creative heritage. Several leading Ukrainian orchestras will tour Europe next year with his compositions.
“WHEN SOMETHING WENT WRONG, I THOUGHT IT WAS MY LAST COMPOSITION”
I met with the maestro on the eve of his jubilee. The composer was obviously ill at ease, being in the limelight.
“Thank God, I’ve lived to this age. On the other hand, I’m scared a little. What next?” he admitted with a rueful smile. “I’ve disliked birthdays since I was a child, maybe because I hate being the center of attention. With time I’ve come to loath all those speeches, even if the speaker is quite sincere. And so I try to make myself scarce in Kyiv on my birthday. Well, a jubilee’s a jubilee, you can’t escape, they’ll find you anyway. I don’t know if I can survive this one. I’ll have to be a Figaro of sorts, trying to get everywhere on time. It’ll be interesting to listen to the choral version of The Flower of the Fern and maybe glimpse the updated rendition of The Vikings. The folk opera Flower... has an interesting history. It’s perhaps because I don’t know biology with ferns multiplying by spores, not flowers, that this composition just can’t start to blossom (laughing). Anyway, the opera is being revived by Mykola Horbych, using his own specific means. It is sung a cappella, and that’s a quite unusual interpretation. Well, I have to give him credit; at least that way the opera is showing signs of life.”
Yevhen Stankovych is often asked how he goes about composing his works. He let me in on some of his creative secrets.
“No one in the family tiptoes when I work; they’ve long got used to the process and pay no attention. I have to work in different conditions, also when there is a lot of noise so I’ve learned to shut it all out and concentrate on my music. I read the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky’s letters in my teens and was amazed by his phrase: ‘I write music the way a shoemaker goes about his business. I work every day.’ There is the truth of the creative process in the composer’s words. You discard everything far-fetched, all that human bravado. Oh, he is creating! Nonsense. The composer’s work is a hard daily toil, requiring considerable mental and physical strain. There are large- scale compositions requiring vast amounts of energy. It’s no secret that such strain affects every author in his own way. In some cases creative individuals are known to have gone insane. It happens because of the unbearable emotional and physical stress. I have been spared this ordeal, thank God. Although there have been difficult periods. When something went wrong, I though it was my last composition.”
One of his latest premieres was the oratorio The Song of Ihor’s Campaign for soprano, tenor, bass, mixed choir, and symphony orchestra.
“The idea of the Song... belongs to Taras Shekhedin of the Ukrainian Institute in New York. Such vast material even made me ill at ease. I worked a lot, but sometimes I though I’d never see the end of it. It’s an hour of continuous music and it was difficult to select the right passages from the text. The libretto was written by Leonid Makhnovetsky and his rhythmic version is very close to the Slavonic original. The oratorio has been performed twice. It takes a certain effort, primarily adjusting the schedules of two performing groups, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Dumka Choir. Their concert itineraries are hard to combine. They wanted to perform it for my jubilee, but Dumka is abroad and Volodymyr Sirenko’s orchestra has just returned from a concert tour, so we’ll have to do without the Song...
“I didn’t work out the jubilee concert programs. It was the initiative of the performing groups willing to take part in the soirees. I haven’t got any special compositions I’d like to hear on my birthday. Hopefully, I still haven’t written my best composition. I’m sorry I couldn’t finish the premiere I’d promised for the jubilee. I’ll probably do it in a month or two and people will hear it, provided the National Symphony Orchestra is still in Kyiv and not on tour somewhere outside Ukraine. Sirenko proposed to play several movements, because the symphony poem is practically ready, but I won’t have a semi-finished product shown to the public.”
Stankovych’s creative legacy is vast: eight symphonies, nine chamber symphonies, the opera Flower of the Fern, five ballets, a host of oratorios, chamber vocal and instrumental pieces along with scores for six plays and over 100 films. For example, his Third Chamber Symphony is rated by UNESCO as among the top ten world compositions. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious titles and awards, and has for a number of years presided over the Composers Union of Ukraine..
VIKING SAGA
Stankovych’s ballet The Vikings, staged two years ago in Kyiv, evoked mixed reviews: excellent music, but poor libretto (Oleksandr Bystrushkin and Yury Stanishevsky), ditto the stage design by Viktor Lytvynov, sketchy personae, lacking verisimilitude, and laughable crowd scenes. The company seemed to have heeded the critics and the libretto underwent some editing. The plot is interesting. Elizabeth, daughter of Kyiv Prince Yaroslav the Wise, marries Viking Harald III the Ruthless [a.k.a. Harold the Hard-Ruler] and becomes queen of Norway. Together they set up the capital city of Oslo. She remains queen for twenty years and after Harald’s death marries Sweyn the Powerful and remains queen of Denmark for ten years.
“What makes them dislike The Vikings is because we are used to their Hollywood portrayals, hefty guys wielding swords and knowing no fear. Yes, they were good warriors, for them real life was on the battlefield. Yet my ballet is not only about war, but also about love. Andriy Shekera was the first to direct it. He was the master of epic powerfully dramatized scenes and a conceptual choreographer with his special outlook. But his illness and death never let the production reach the stage. Lytvynov took over. He is very good at the lyrical aspect. He has many symbolic scenes and he discarded the large scale. Viktor, however, couldn’t have normal rehearsals, either because he had a tight schedule or because some members of the cast were away on concert tours, so that they could work only now and then, rather than on a regular basis. He couldn’t do everything as planned. Several scenes have been added to more fully reveal the leading characters, the finale is somewhat different, and there will be no battle scenes.”
AVE, MAESTRO!
The celebrant’s profile would be incomplete without contributions by colleagues and friends. People who have known Yevhen Stankovych for a long time, while admiring his talent, agree that he is a very modest, even humble person.
“Stankovych is communicable and democratic. He is interesting and enjoyable to work with. He is very kind, without a trace of self- conceit or the maestro complex of self-aggrandizement – as is often the case with creative personalities. He is very organized and generous. He is very popular with musicians. I had something to do with his Hallowed Be Thy Name,” recalls national opera conductor Ivan Hamkalo. “The symphony orchestra worked with the Dumka Choir. We performed it in Ukraine and on a concert tour in Zurich. His Ave Maria was a special success. Five years ago, Zurich’s New Music group marked its centennial and the management wanted to diversify the program, commissioning compositions in various countries. Stankovych’s was a sonorous voice in the motley modern polyphony at the jubilee concert. Both the audience and performers agreed that Ukrainian music was the soiree’s favorite. Unfortunately, one of our joint ideas never came to fruition – Stankovych hasn’t written an opera matching his talent, something like Borys Liatoshynsky’s Gold Headband or Kostiantyn Dankevych’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky; an opera history awaits from him.
“As for his compositional style, his music cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. He has his own style and way of thinking. His works are based on the best specimens of Ukrainian music, primarily those of his teacher Borys Liatoshynsky. Yevhen Stankovych has imbibed the attainments of European avant- garde music and blend them with the Ukrainian folk tradition of his native Zakarpattia. The result is an interesting amalgam. His works are Ukrainian as well as world music of the second half of the twentieth century.”
Oleksandr Bystrushkin, head of Kyiv’s chief directorate of culture and art, author of The Vikings libretto, admits that he has known Stankovych since the 1960s. Apart from great talent, the maestro has three remarkable traits: generosity, diligence, and mobility. Smiling, he recalls when Stankovych treated them, a group of young actors, to food and drink after receiving a royalty. He had callused fingers, he was in a hurry to carry out a commission for the capital’s 1,500th jubilee in 1982. He revised The Vikings score several times to meet the librettist’s and choreographer’s requirements. Bystrushkin feels sure that there is nothing by way of obduracy about him; he would never say something like I’m the maestro and everything will be the way I wrote. He can listen people out and heed their views, and he also knows how to convince them that he is right.
NOT JUBILEE QUESTIONS
Music critic Olena Zinkevych says “We are all in great debt to the composer. We must raise the issue of Stankovych’s musical and theatrical heritage. For example, the Mariyinsky Theater plays everything written by Andrei Petrov. St. Petersburg is proud of its celebrated citizen. We have a composer of an even greater caliber, but the Kyiv theater seems oblivious to the fact. This is very strange. During an author’s lifetime we act as onlookers. He has made his name? Great. Oh, he hasn’t? Too bad. We are often sparing of deserved praise. But when that man dies we begin to beat our breasts, telling everybody that he was a genius who lived right beside us and what a pity that he could not carry out so many plans.”
There are only two of Stankovych ballets in the National Opera’s repertoire, Christmas Eve and The Vikings. Why do we care so little about our nation’s talent? Previously, the repertoire included his ballets Olha and Prometheus. Yes, they were staged twenty years ago and could be described as formal production from the contemporary standpoint. As it is, Shekera’s renditions are being squeezed out of the repertoire after his death.
Staging Stankovych is a serious test of skill for every choreographer, because his every work is a challenge with an entirely new genre trend. It forces the ballet master to look for a new way to convey the message onstage, to make discoveries that regrettably often don’t measure up to the music. His folk opera The Flower of the Fern is still on paper. Yevhen Lysyk made excellent stage props and Anatoly Shekera offered an interesting stage version, but in the 1980s the ballet was branded as bourgeois nationalist. Granted, but we are now in our eleventh year of independence and there are actually no contemporary Ukrainian compositions in the National Opera’s repertoire. Why? Olena Zinkevych correctly points out that we should take advantage of this jubilee ask not jubilee questions, and also try to get things rolling so that the nation’s opera stages have not only what is ordered by foreign impresarios before going on concert tours, but also show that it really is the nation’s leading company boasting the best creations of modern Ukrainian culture.
The new academic year started several weeks ago at the National Academy of Music where Yevhen Stankovych heads the Department of Composition.
“I had never thought I’d live to be a teacher,” he admits, “because I’d never been into selection. I consider myself a young teacher, for I’ve worked at the conservatory for only ten years. I was invited to head the department after Andriy Shtoharenko left. I decided to give it a try and then found myself drawn into the teaching process. Of late my students have shown a very satisfactory performance. They are not even perturbed by the understanding that composition is no longer regarded as a prestigious occupation, unless you write music for pop hits. There are three or five really talented students, and they could well become excellent composers if they are lucky and add to the popularity of Ukrainian music. So long as there are musicians prepared to ignore the material aspect for the sake of creativeness, Ukrainian music has a future.”
