Karmella Tsepkolenko’s piano performance
Capital’s music billboards announce with increasing frequency the concerts that take place in unusual places by efforts of non-governmental civic organizations. One such soiree took place at the exhibit gallery of the Art Development Foundation. It is the third season to host author’s evenings, which present to the audience the music of contemporary Ukrainian composers. The organizers are the National Portal of Academic Music and Art Development Foundation in cooperation with the National Committee of Ukraine, the International Music Council and the National Union of Composers of Ukraine. The framework of the cycle includes creative meetings with such our renowned contemporaries as Valentyn Sylvestrov, Myroslav Skoryk, Yevhen Stankovych, and Hanna Havrylets.
The organizers dedicated this year’s concert series to the creative work of Ukrainian female composers. The gallery of author’s portraits was launched by the Lviv artist Bohdana Froliak. The next music portrait presented her Odesa colleague Karmella Tsepkolenko.
The concert enjoyed a full house. Some people in the audience had to stand to listen to the concert, which featured the music that is not frequently performed in concert halls, and which is called a new music in the world’s artistic milieu. Modern composing techniques, unusual approach to traditional genres and forms of imaginative thinking, synthesis of arts, exploration of new sounding, including electric and acoustic sound, are separate attributes of the music of the late 20th-early 21st centuries.
In Ukraine the stream of new music is headed by a bright personality, Karmella Tsepkolenko. A representative of the Odesa composing school, she continued her education at leading music centers of the world. She is a winner of the M. Liatoshynsky Award and prestigious international awards.
Owing to her fanatic devotion to the new music and organizing skills, Odesa has been holding since 1995 the International Festival “2 Days and 2 Nights of New Music,” which is one of the world’s leading forums of contemporary art. At the same time the Ukrainian composer headed the Association of New Music, which is now part of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ICM).
Tsepkolenko presented her creative portrait as an extended piano performance. The works, which were performed by wonderful pianist Oleksandr Perepelytsia and the author herself, enchanted the audience with the depth and tension of emotions. The openness of her work Self-Reflections for piano and magnetic tape, which recorded a woman’s confession, chimerical sounds, and rhythms of electronic instruments and percussion, was quite impressive. The music of the opus Meeting the Memory seemed to be an alarming warning about how dangerous it is to forget one’s ancestors and the past. The images of the composition Solo-Solissimo, which Karmella created at the request of an Alban pianist, who could play only with his right hand, were really touching. The intense play of feelings, decoded in the music to the triptych Playing Cards, was followed by the autumn atmosphere of the piano play From Blues and naively beautiful sound patterns, which in their turn were followed by a change of pictures on an easel (from the music to a children’s text book Artistic Games).
Each of the presented works bore a part of a mystery of the world of a person who responds to the contemporary sounds, rhythms, and tone colors. They sound as well in the music of other Ukrainian female composers, recorded on Karmella’s initiative on the CD entitled Frankness of the Mystery. Such could be the title of the author’s soiree of Karmella Tsepkolenko.
What do our talented contemporaries feel? What impulses do they bring by recreating them through their art? That was the topic of Tsepkolenko’s music performance.
