Focus on Ukraine (2024/2025) - Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester

Focus on Ukraine

aug.

Saturday 19:00

BUY TICKET

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra accompanies Ukrainian artists in this concert on Ukraine’s Independence Day. There will be an element of Ukrainian folk music, for example in the new work Reflections on a Folk Song by Leonid Desyatnikov, while music from other periods and places are heard in the modern classic Der Bote, in which Valentin Silvestrov combines music by Mozart with a contemporary musical idiom. Music knows no borders, but at the heart of this concert is Ukraine.

The concert is broadcast live on Swedish Radio P2

Participants

Members of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Musicians from the Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Maxim Rysanov, conductor

Grammy-nominated Ukrainian-British violist and conductor Maxim Rysanov is a frequent guest at renowned venues worldwide, whilst his thriving parallel career as a conductor sees him often combine conducting with performing as a soloist within the same concert programme. A past winner of Gramophone Young Artist of the Year Award, he is also a prize-winner at prestigious international competitions. Rysanov has given world premières of works by Dobrinka Tabakova, Pēteris Vasks, Richard Dubugnon and Valentin Bibik. He also has a close working relationship with composers such as Leonid Desyatnikov, Giya Kancheli and Elena Langer.

In the 2023/24 season, Rysanov toured with the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Europe and with the Hallé Orchestra in the United Kingdom. He premiered a new version of Dobrinka Tabakova’s Viola Concerto with the Bulgarian Radio Orchestra and the Riga Sinfonietta. Other highlights include performing and recording with the Yehudi Menuhin Orchestra, recording with the Hallé Orchestra, and invitations to festivals such as Schleswig-Holstein, Carl Nielsen in Odense, OModernt in Stockholm, and Westport. Additionally, he joined the jury of the Liszt Academy Bartók Competition.

Rysanov’s recordings have gained numerous award nominations and shortlists. His album In Schubert’s Company was selected as Gramophone Magazine’s Critics Choice of the Year. The album Voices, also featuring the Riga Sinfonietta, with music by Pēteris Vasks including the viola concerto dedicated to Rysanov, also received critical acclaim. He plays a 1780 Giuseppe Guadagnini viola, “Il Soldato” on private loan arranged by Premiere Performances Hong Kong.

Natalya Pasichnyk, piano

Ukrainian-Swedish pianist Natalya Pasichnyk has performed at prestigious venues the world over, from Suntory Hall in Tokyo to the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and at festivals such as La Folle journée in France, Schubertiada in Spain and Gdańsk Piano Autumn in Poland. She has played with orchestras including the Mozarteum Orchestra, Orchestre d’Auvergne, Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and with conductors such as Michael Zilm, Christopher Hogwood, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Arie van Beck and Jacek Kaspszyk. Having a vast repertoire, she not only performs on contemporary instruments but also historical ones.

She has made numerous recordings for radio and TV in Sweden, Belgium, Spain and Poland, and critically acclaimed albums with various prominent record labels. Her 2016 release Consolation: Forgotten Treasures of the Ukrainian Soul was met with the highest acclaim and named highlight of the year by German paper Mittel-Bayerische. She is a prize-winner at several international competitions.

Pasichnyk is a frequent jury member at international competitions and regularly gives masterclasses. In 2014, she founded the Ukrainian Institute in Sweden. She has been the artistic leader of several music festivals. In 2021, she received her Doctor of Arts for her project on George Crumb’s Makrokosmos. Two years later, she earned her Ph.D. in Artistic Research at the Grieg Academy in Bergen for her project “Rethinking the Well-Tempered Clavier”, a project which also earned her the Church of Sweden’s cultural stipend in 2022. Early 2024, that Ph.D. project turned into a brand-new album recorded with the Calmus Ensemble.

About the concert

The Argentinian-Israeli composer Osvaldo Golijov’s 2022 work Tenebrae for string quartet is a lament inspired by two contrasting events Golijov had witnessed two years earlier. During a visit to Israel he experienced the escalation of violence, and only a week later he visited the Planetarium in New York with his five-year-old son, who was amazed to see planet Earth as a small blue dot in cosmos. The work pits brutal war against the innocence and optimism of youth.

The British composer John Woolrich’s Ulysses Awakes (1989) for solo viola and strings was inspired by Claudio Monteverdi’s opera Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (Ulysses’ Return) from 1640. Ulysses has surfaced on the coast of Ithaca, confused, wondering where he has ended up and whether he is asleep or awake. Woolrich has arranged Ulysses’ entrance aria, with the solo viola accompanied by strings.

The seed of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C-Minor was sown in 1783, when Mozart started to take an interest in counterpoint after encountering Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. The fugue was originally written for two pianos (K426) but was adapted in 1788 for strings with an added slow, mournful introduction. Mozart described it in his catalogue as a “short adagio for two violins, viola and bass, for a fugue I wrote long ago”.

Reflections on a Folk Song was commissioned from the Ukrainian composer Leonid Desyatnikov. He is primarily known as a composer working with film and opera, and his music is described by him as “minimalist, but with a human face”.

Valintin Silvestrov is one of Ukraine’s foremost composers. His Der Bote (The Messenger) from 1996 is a sonatina, written in the form of a Mozart pastiche for piano, string orchestra and synthesizer. The work is dedicated to Silvestrov’s wife, who died the same year. The title refers to texts by the philosopher Yakov Druskin (1901–1980), whose fictive “messenger” represents a link between our world and the world beyond.

Stille Musik for string orchestra (2002) is one of Silvestrov’s most played works. The three movements are: Walzer des Augenblicks (Waltz of the Moment), Abendserenade (Evening Serenade) and Augenblicke der Serenade (Moment of the Serenade). This music radiates metaphysical depth and a melancholic power. According to the composer it is a metaphor for silence, as “the melody is a symbol for something that cannot be expressed, but rather an indication of life-affirming joy”.

Grażyna Bacewicz is considered the most important Polish composer of the first half of the 20^th century, and she rose to international fame. She was never included among the ground-breaking avantgarde, but her expressiveness, sense of form and strong personality renders her music timeless. Bacewicz’s musical idiom developed from neoclassicism, via bi- and polytonality to a play with light atonality. Concert for String Orchestra (1948) is one of her most played works. Its mechanic rhythmicity and contrast-rich dynamics results in a colourful composition in the Neo-Baroque style, which has added to the concert’s popularity.

Text: Andreas Konvicka