Entrusting One’s Soul to The Sounds of the Organ
The name of Iryna Kalynovska, soloist of the National House of Organ and Chamber Music, Meritorious Artiste of Ukraine, laureate of the All-Ukrainian Organ Contest, for almost two decades has been regularly found on playbills in Kyiv. Perhaps in the modern world such popularity of an organ player, even if only in her homeland, is rare. Every month Iryna turns up onstage at her home concert hall several times. In addition, she tours abroad in Ukraine. However, arranging tours of the CIS states has recently become a more and more complex task. Long-established traditions have vanished; there is no opportunity now to perform in the former Soviet Baltic republics having the most abundant traditions of organ music.
Concert organists are people obsessed. To understand the sense of this expression, it is not enough to imagine the musicians poring over their sheet music. They often have to rehearse by night, because Kyiv St. Nicholas Church is not only a center for an intensive concert life but also a full-fledged religious structure.
Iryna Kalynovska is a strong woman. Every day she has to subjugate the enormous element of sounds, the element of innumerable, majestically upright pipes, the element of space enclosed inside the gothic crypts, unrestrainedly filling it with music. A special mood is created in such moments when Iryna is rehearsing a new piece in a dark hall, face to face with her music. It is then that the special sacrament of the first meeting with the author’s ideas embodied in the music notation happens.
Iryna Kalynovska’s recent concert, which took place on January 26, in spite of all the intensity of organist’s concert activities, can be considered a significant event in her career. The program included a number of rarely performed works by Romanticism composers Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Charles-Marie Widor, and CОsar Auguste Franck. Playing romantic music on the organ has its complications. As is generally known, the organ can be compared to an orchestra: this instrument makes it possible to recreate timbres of many orchestral instruments. In order to do so, it is necessary to switch registers, and this is what organists’ assistants do during the concert.
Iryna Kalynovska has created an organ transcription for a well- known adagio by Tomaso Albinoni. She usually finishes her concert with it, playing it as an encore. And so it was at her January concert.
Kalynovska gets many unforgettable impressions from her tours and creative communication with her colleagues — musicians, singers and instrumentalists, together with whom she performs on the concert stage. Among such meetings was performing with Liubov Kazarnovskaya who in 1985, when being a beginner, gave a solo concert in Kyiv. Then she performed pieces of old music accompanied by organ. Today Liubov Kazarnovskaya is a Russian singer widely known all over the world. Equally unforgettable for Iryna was her creative cooperation with Gedre Kaukaite, a Lithuanian singer. They have performed joint concerts in Vilnius, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. They were planning further tours, but then history had interfered into the course of events with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Naturally, Iryna constantly works with Ukrainian singers. Particularly memorable are her performing together with People’s Artiste of Ukraine Liudmyla Yurchenko. Recently Iryna was on tour in Italy. Her concerts in there are usually held on major Catholic holidays. This Christmas she showed a quite unusual program: her partners were singer Nadiya Petrenko and trumpeter Andriy Ilkiv. The musicians performed in Genoa and Rapallo. Another country, which Iryna’s concert routes are traditionally bound up with, is Germany. In 2000 alone Iryna Kalynovska visited it six times. In February she is planning to give two concerts in Kyiv. In the immediate future Iryna will submit to the public a number of large solo programs, one of which will be entirely dedicated to the music of Bach.
