Roman KOFMAN: “The fact that I work as a conductor is a miracle”

The Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by the maestro successfully materialized the high meaning of music, giving pleasure, as it performed Rapsodie espagnole by Maurice Ravel, a Romanian rhapsody by George Enescu, a Hungarian rhapsody by Franz Liszt, a Hutsul rhapsody by Heorhii Maiboroda. In the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for solo piano and symphony orchestra by Sergei Rachmaninoff the solo was performed by a guest from Lithuania, pianist Lukas Geniusas – and he gave a brilliant performance, winning the audience with the crystal pure sound and flawless technique. The entire concert was like shining sounds: it always happens when maestro Roman Kofman goes on stage. And the title of the genre reminded the audience that a rhapsode, according to the antique explanation of the term, was a wandering singer with a baton, who, by literal translation, “sews the songs together.” This is a precise description of a conductor, who wanders for his lifetime from one melody to another, creating a harmonious music combination.

Kofman authors conceptual music projects which create a new reality. He is both a prose writer, and a poet, and his books include publications which have become classical, A Book of Oblivion; A Pastoral Symphony, or As I lived at Germans; It Will Be Always Like This; An Ode to the Employees.

Kofman organized the first author’s concerts by Alfred Schnittke and Giya Kancheli in Ukraine. He has performed with 73 orchestras of many countries of the world. In 2003-08 he worked in Germany as a Bonn General Music Director, headed the Beethoven Orchestra and the Bonn Opera House. The author’s cycles of concerts, “Roman Kofman and friends,” “Great Names,” “All Symphonies by Schubert,” “All Symphonies by Tchaikovsky,” “All Symphonies by Beethoven,” “All Symphonies by Mozart,” “Ukrainian Avant-Garde,” “A Week of High Classics with Roman Kofman” became great events of Ukraine’s culture life.

On February 28, 2014, when the Maidan barricades were still standing, he performed at a requiem concert dedicated to the memory of the Heavenly Hundred. Again, in 2014 he organized the project “Dedication to the Ukrainian People” with the participation of Gidon Kremer and Giya Kancheli. On September 29, 2016 he performed with the national Symphony Orchestra at a mass dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy. These are not just fragments of biography. These are the deeds that define the scale of the personality.

The Day interviewed Roman Kofman after his rehearsal at the Philharmonic Society.

At your anniversary concert you admitted that you were not a teenager anymore and that you were going to work seriously on music projects. You have kept your promise, starting with the opening of the season: Prokofiev’s Concert No. 3 that featured Antonii Baryshevsky who performed the piano part, the premiere of Valentyn Bibik’s work Belling Way. Your recent projects featured famous soloists, such as pianist Eliso Virsaladze, violinist Emmanuel Chgnavoryan, trumpeter Otto Sauter. The concert “Invitation to a Dance” came quite unexpected to the audience. The light music created by outstanding composers contained such a powerful message of joy, so that it was impossible not to believe it.

“We were performing on the eve of the Catholic Christmas, therefore this, at first glance, weird, program emerged. The entertaining side of the music is unfairly considered to be unimportant. Jazz and country music are supposed to entertain. Indeed, music can be very serious, tragic, deep, and noble. But if we return to the origins, the music emerged and developed as an auxiliary component in work and a necessary accessory of leisure, which included dances and songs, or dancing songs. I have never refused from the so-called ‘light music’ in my youth, when I was working as a violinist at the Ukrainian Radio Orchestra. It was then that I organized a small symphonic jazz band of the orchestra musicians. And our band was offered to take part in Radio Day festivities on May 7. There was no repertory for the symphonic jazz sphere, so I brought home a plate of the Czech orchestra conducted by Dalibor Brazda and wrote the score for two numbers, ‘Feast of Violins’ and ‘Lullaby’ from Porgy and Bess. My daughter was a baby then, so my wife was a bit angry with me, because at that time we were living in a one-room apartment. But I wrote the scores and our symphonic jazz band performed at the Grand Hall of the conservatory.”

SOUNDS FLYING INTO THE SKY

As a master of so-called “music programming,” you include a concept in every program, so your projects have an influence on the audience unaware of the word “conceptuality.” Has it always been like this?

“Of course, not. At the beginning of my work of a conductor, I didn’t have an opportunity to create the programs. I made up a chamber orchestra of my friends from the conservatory. The administration of the House of Composers at Pushkinska Street allowed us to rehearse there and use their stage for the concerts on the condition that we would be performing only the works created by the members of the Union of the Composers of Ukraine. When in 1991 I started to work with the Kyiv Chamber Orchestra, the time of freedom began. I met Gidon Kremer and remembered his words, ‘The program is 70 percent of success.’ I didn’t believe him, but I understood that he was right later, and it became a sport for me.”

What will the Kyiv audience see this concert season?

“The February concert’s program will include the music by Sibelius and Prokofiev. They were practically contemporaries, who were living and creating on the same continent and shared the high class of composer’s mastery. The concert of Prokofiev’s violin works will feature French violinist Fedor Rudin as a soloist, and it will be the first time that Sibelius tone poem The Swan of Tuonela will be performed in Kyiv.

“In March the audience will hear Ravel’s suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. French cellist Harry Hoffman will perform a solo in Schumann’s Concerto for a cello and an orchestra. We met and performed together in picturesque town Kronberg not far from Frankfurt at an international cello festival, attended by famous musicians. The festival was founded by my good acquaintance, a cellist Raymond Trenkler, and it has a great protector, the wife of great Pablo Casals, a Puerto-Rico signora Marta Casals-Istomin. In 2011 Harry Hoffman attended the Week of High Classics in Kyiv and performed with my Kyiv Chamber Orchestra at the Lavra Gallery, now he will perform with the Symphony Orchestra at the Column Hall. In May together for the first time in Ukraine we will perform the oratorio by Charles Gounod Death and Life with the Chamber Choir Credo. We will close the season with the performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the choir Dumka.”

You have been heading the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic Society for four years.

“This is a significant event for me. At last I was offered to head a Symphony orchestra in my homeland, and it was on the eve my 80th anniversary. I thought it was high time, so I agreed. At that time I stopped communicating with my foreign colleagues, because I stopped flying on planes, and I understood that I was longing for a symphony orchestra which has a better selection of works and brighter colors.”

Why in your book A Conductor and An Orchestra, Or 100 Unnecessary Recommendations To Young Conductors you are calling a symphony orchestra the most unique creation of human civilization?

“Because a hundred of people gather and do whatever they like. There is a famous joke, ‘Where do you work?’ – ‘I perform in an orchestra.’ – ‘Clearly, you do. Where do you work?’ Everyone is playing their instruments. These instruments greatly differ from one another. There are also people who write the scores, and another person who doesn’t need any high technologies, only his hands and a conductor’s baton. Altogether they create a product which consists of something unperceivable – just sounds flying into the air. And this product has a colossal effect on the people who hear it, the audience.”

What is this influence?

“If it has an influence, all verbs are in place here: it teaches to be noble, it calms down, it excites, brings one to senses, calls to mercy, makes one tearful – in a word, music makes one do anything, except for committing a crime.”

What about laugh?

“Of course! You should only listen to The Little Antiformalistic Paradise by Shostakovich. Or the operetta Die Fledermaus – I mean music, not the text.”

Is this influence long-lasting?

“It lasts forever. It doesn’t disappear anywhere.”

“I ALWAYS WANT TO WRITE”

You have finished your new, autobiographical, book. At what stage is it now?

“Suspended. I have written it. The text is ready and the photos have been digitalized, the only thing that remains is publishing.”

What is the title?

“How I Spent My Life. I’ve spent my life in a great company, with God, the party, the government, my family, and close friends. But I cannot complete it right now. This is the first volume in the series.”

So, you are thinking about writing a new one already. Do you want to write?

“I always want to write. I don’t always want to get involved in music, but I always want to write. I want to come back to poetry very much. I love poetry, poets who can play with the word and its sounding are close to me. Right now I don’t write poems much, because they don’t work on the principle, ‘No day without a line.’ It works with the prose, but it doesn’t work with poetry. I have had periods when I was writing verse, and most often they were caused by envy.”

Are you kidding?

“When I saw a book of a good poet, I wanted to take paper and start writing. In 1996 I published my collection of poems, The Face of Earth, but since then I have written more. I would like to publish a more complete collection of my poems, as well as a collection of non-serious works. I have a lot of epigrams, ironic poetry and prose, which I want to publish, if I find a publisher.”

ON LIFE AND MIRACLES

Have miracles ever happened in your life?

“With an exaggeration I can say that they have. The fact that I work as a conductor is a miracle. I never wanted to be a conductor. When I left the chamber orchestra in 1966, I had a phone call from the inspector of the Pavlo Virsky Orchestra and he asked me, ‘Is it true that you resigned? Work with us as a violinist. I tried to refuse gently, I said it wasn’t my sphere, it wasn’t academic music.’ And he continued, ‘In three months our ensemble is going to the US. We need a second conductor, and we’re holding an audition right now.’ – ‘But I’m not a conductor!’ – ‘You can try. And now come to work with our orchestra as a concertmaster without auditioning. Hurry up.’ I agreed. My wife was working part-time at the pedagogy institute at the therapeutic pedagogy department, we had a little child. My father had a small pension, and my mother didn’t have any pension at all.

“When I entered the Small Hall of the Philharmonic Society, they were holding an audition with professional conductors. They had to conduct an orchestra with two numbers. Pavlo Virsky criticized all of them. After every attempt, the inspector came up to me and said, ‘Roman, give it a try,’ and I replied, ‘You want me to become an embarrassment?’ Suddenly I decided to agree. I was given two scores, at home I locked myself inside of the bathroom, put the score on the sink, and conducted. Iryna Mykolaivna came home and she couldn’t find me. She saw that the bathroom was locked from inside. When she found out everything, she cried out, ‘What are you doing? You’re crazy! You have no coordination of hands!’ I remembered this phrase for a long time. I replied, ‘It’s too late. Tomorrow I will conduct an orchestra.’ I came, started to conduct, and on the following day Virsky said, ‘Fill in the forms, you’re going to the US as a second conductor.’ My family didn’t believe that the authorities would let me out, but I filled in the forms, and I went.

“In the US at first I was only rehearsing. Then Virsky said, ‘Our next concert will take place in Montreal, it’s time for you to conduct. Do you want me to stand near and help you?’ I refused from his help, I felt exhilaration. I conducted a total of 24 concerts during that tour. On our return, I received an offer to work permanently as the second conductor, and I entered the conductor’s department of the conservatoire. After we returned from the US, at a banquet at the Metro Restaurant Virsky told me secretly that I had been crossed out of the list immediately, but he went to the high echelons and said, ‘If I don’t go, the tour will take place. If Kofman doesn’t go, there will be no tour.’ And the country needed currency badly at that time.”

What helps you to live?

“I think it’s my indifference to the external sides of life and success, like awards and titles. This keeps my world untouched. Something does concern me, but it doesn’t distract me from the most important things.

“My family helps a lot, my wonderful wife and daughter [wife Iryna Sablina is the founder and first artistic director of the Shchedryk Choir, which is now headed by their daughter Marianna Sablina. – Author]. And my wonderful son-in-law, who inspires me with his optimism [Aidar Torybaev, the chief conductor of the Eurasian Orchestra of the Kazakh National University of Arts. – Author]. Recently Aidar was preparing a youth orchestra he had formed for a Vienna tour and he told me that Schubert Symphony No. 2 would be performed at the famous Musikverein Hall. I asked him, ‘Are you going to take a Schubert work to Vienna? How is the orchestra going to handle it?’ He replied, ‘I am the chief conductor. I tell them to play, so they play.’ When he sees me surrounded by piles of scores, he asks, ‘Why are you torturing yourself? You’re the chief conductor. You just need to tell them to play.’”

You have answered many questions. Are there any questions yet that you haven’t answered?

“The questions have just started to emerge. Recently I asked myself, ‘Why am I not a falcon? Why am I not flying?’ I haven’t found an answer to this question yet.”