To each his own front

The Day has already reported that the well-known Lviv band Pikkardiiska Tertsia (“Picardy third”) has twice toured eastern and southern Ukraine in the past year. Now the vocalists are packing their suitcases again. They will show a concert program, “New and Best,” between May 11 and 20 in Dnipropetrovsk, Kryvy Rih, Kirovohrad, Oleksandriia, Poltava, Sumy, Zaporizhia, Melitopol, Kherson, and Mykolaiv. The tour is organized by the company Kvartal-Kontsert.

“It is a third tour of this kind, and this fact shows that the east and the south want to hear Ukrainian songs and the Tertsia,” Volodymyr YAKYMETS, artistic director of the vocal band Pikkardiiska Tertsia, told The Day. “Tours are extremely important to us – this seems to be our debt to those audiences because, for some reasons, we had not so often been giving concerts in that part of Ukraine over the previous 22 years. But people need these contacts. After concerts, listeners come to see us behind the scenes and say that our singing gives them distraction and moral relaxation. The Ukrainians are doing so much for their country, including the army and refugees. After all, every sound-minded person is now contributing all they can to the defense of our state. Each is fighting at their own front. Ours is a cultural front.”

The “New and Best” program includes songs from various periods of the band’s activity. Specially for the new tour, the band has chosen some songs which it has not performed for a long time, such as “Words,” “Yesterday I Flew to the Sky,” “I Asked.” The concert is bound to comprise folk songs, Volodymyr Ivasiuk’s hits, as well as first-time compositions which will soon make part of the sextet’s new, 15th, album.

The Tertsia was formed in 1992. Its vocalists – Volodymyr Yakymets, Yaroslav Nudyk, Bohdan Bohach, Andrii Kapral, Andrii Shavala, and Roman Turianyn – are masters of a cappella singing. Pikkardiiska Tertsia’s repertoire consists of about 300 songs in the most various musical styles: pop, rock, classic, folk, jazz, country, sacred music, rock-n-roll, and blues. It is a 95-percent Ukrainian-language repertoire.

The band is a welcome guest in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, France, Canada, the US, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and even Singapore.

In 2008 they won the National Taras Shevchenko Prize.