Rivne hosts the first New Performing Art International Music Festival
Rivne has hosted a festival called Nove Vykonavstvo [New Performing Art], one in a series of hopeless albeit important cultural undertakings, something only a Ukrainian province is capable of. It is thanks to such projects that the cities hosting them can make a better impression on the map of Ukraine, doing what is best described as closing part of the conventional cultural circuit originating from the capital.
Rivne is not that far from Kyiv. There is a regular train, popularly known as the Merry 600, arriving in Kyiv very early. Volyn, Polissia, quiet people, serene environs. A river with the peaceful name of Ustia runs its quiet waters across the territory. On one of its banks stands the House of Organ and Chamber Music (a former Roman Catholic Cathedral). Everything happened there. Every evening guest performers from Lviv and Kyiv, from Russia and Lithuania would appear on its stage. Every night people, with coats and windbreakers on, would gather in the cold interior, forming the world’s most appreciative audience, composed of the provincial intelligentsia, schoolteachers, and students, eager to listen to every sound with keen neophyte attentiveness.
In addition to the sensitive audience, Rivne was also fortunate to have its musical lobby. The locals, among them Petro Tovstukha, conductor and member of the Drevo Ensemble, composer Alla Zahaikevych — they had made their names at the capital, but they remembered where they came from. Largely due to their “guild connections” Nove Vykonavstvo turned out the way every such festival should, given the time of year (e.g., freezing, early darkening November): diversified, polyphonic, showing variegated talent.
In fact, the title, New Performing Art, allowed broad interpretation. The festival featured concerts based on juxtaposing modern and historical material. Thus, Baroque-New Music included Kyiv’s Viktoriya Poleva’s White Funeral based on Hennady Aigi’s verse, Kharkiv’s Alexander Greenberg’s Crazy Jingles, written specially for the festival, performed along with Bach’s Concerto No. 3, Mozart’s Fugue, and Vivaldi’s Concerto Madrigalesco. Josef Ermine, a pianist from Lviv, performed works by Valentyn Sylvestrov, Olivier Messiaen, Tori Takematsu, and Alfred Schnittke with the Rivne regional chamber orchestra. The following evening the audience heard peaceful lute music dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, performed by Anatoly Shpakov of Kyiv. The final concert highlighted the Voskresinnia [Resurrection] Choir with their technically sophisticated and emotionally diversified program consisting of modern vocal pieces and baroque religious compositions, choral experiments in the romantic and classical epochs.
In a word, such a combination of schools and names allowed the festival to start off on a quality basis; an apt combination of tradition and experimentation gives rise to some powerful energy, the kind required in bringing any kind of project to fruition. Hence the token beginning; it was as though the Heavens favored it, as the first genuinely winter snowfall in Rivne accompanied the first festival night, after Poleva’s melancholic opus.
Folk music soirees were especially popular with the festival audiences, starring Kyiv’s Drevo with their traditional singing (conducted by Yevhen Yefremov) and Moscow’s Kozachy Krug (founded by Vladimir Skuntsev). Both choirs proved to be true zealots, having collected the rarest of folk songs, visiting the remotest villages, learning the music and lyrics from hundred-year-old men and women. Drevo has developed a truly professional approach in its fifteen years, without any prejudice to their scholarly enthusiasm, after traveling with their listeners all over the geographical center of Ukraine — especially Poltava oblast and Polissia — and which area appears least explored. Mournful, merry, philosophical songs, and ballads about love and death, merging into a saga about a people leaving its noticeable trace in world history. The Russian Krug responded beautifully to the Drevo’s challenge the very next evening. The Russians made every vocal number into a small dramatic performance, singing songs governed by different Don Cossack traditions, originating from the Khoper, Terek, and Kuban communities, including rare authentic pieces such as Nekrasov Cossack songs dating back over 300 years. They finally conquered the audience with a couple of Zaporozhzhian Sich songs (in perfect Ukrainian).
After such impressive discourses into folk vocal history, modern compositions proved far less spectacular, meant for a limited, chamber audience. Apparently, avant-garde renditions were something entirely new for the Rivne public, although the performers — Petro Tovstukha, actor and singer Natalka Polovynka, singer Inna Halatenko, and violinist Serhiy Okhrymchuk — put their hearts in their jobs and were appreciated by the listeners and spectators. Alla Zahaikevych’s two renditions, the chamber opera Numbers and Winds (lyrics and setting by Mykola Vorobiov) and Run... Breathe... Keep Silent (an electro-acoustic installation for three performers, real-time recorded and computer- enhanced) brought the feeling of a new kind of poetry and sound, rooted in a harmony of music, verse, even processor-generated static.
However, the soiree dedicated to the Lithuanian composer Sarunas Nakas (a most interesting creative figure in the post-Soviet theater) became the focal event of the festival. As a conductor, critic, and composer writing scores for plays and films, Sarunas emerges primarily as an ideologue of a new creative trend, striving to step over the boundary lines separating genres and epochs. The captivating effect of crossing those lines, of launching a cultural dialog inside one’s own compositions was enhanced by the concert’s well-construed program. The elegant vocal miniature Sanguis (soprano solo by Inna Hnatenko) was followed by the fury of the Falling Portraits, Broken Hearts, and Lasting Victims, with Natalka Polovynka’s exhaled recitals from the Romans supplemented by computer-generated music, static, and other special audio effects. Then there was the meditative Roadside Chapel for solo trombone, and By the Gate to the Kingdom of God, a refined audio photograph (in the author’s words), born of music recorded using wax recording cylinders a hundred years ago, incorporating sounds of rivers, waterfalls, wind, live drums, and birds singing. Versatile components notwithstanding, the concert proved a harmonious whole, not even a phonograph but a fresco, perhaps a music drama with its intrigue, culmination, and happy ending.
These are perhaps the highlights of the nine-day Nove Vykonavstvo marathon. The festival program was skillfully made, boasting most prestigious performers, but the event still looks very much like a single-handed exploit (e.g., Tovstukha, project coordinator, Olena Mykhailova, et al.). In the long run, however, their efforts may have a future. Rivne needs this festival, even if not on a massive scale, looking rather like a series of concerts, because this Ukrainian town needs a festive atmosphere to be shared by people onstage and in the audience: not just bread and circuses, but a real holiday.
Desire complimented by talent can accomplish great things.
