Collection of Ukrainian Classics
Alla Zahaikevych is a Ukrainian contemporary classical music composer, performance artist, cultural manager, and musicologist. Since 1998 she has been a lecturer at the Composition and Music Information Technologies Department of the National Music Academy of Ukraine, Kyiv, where she founded the Electroacoustic Music Studio.
Alla Zahaikevych is an artistic director of the Kyiv-based international electroacoustic music collectives Electroacoustics (since 2003) and EM-VISIA (since 2005), and has been head of the Association of Electroacoustic Music at the National Composers Union of Ukraine.
Zahaikevych’s works include symphonic, instrumental, and vocal chamber music, electroacoustic compositions, multimedia installations and performances, chamber opera, and film soundtracks (such as for the films Mamai and Povodyr).
Source: The Claquers
Heinali is the moniker of Ukrainian composer and sound-artist Oleh Shpudeiko. He specialises in modular synthesis and takes inspiration from the Western music tradition's medieval and renaissance polyphony. The Heinali project also encompasses interdisciplinary, multi-media art projects and soundtracks. Since 2019, Oleh has been a co-author and co-host, together with Alexey Shmurak, of the АШОШ education podcast and vlog covering a wide range of music and sound related topic in an accessible language, ranging from music history and theory to the phenomenology of groove, problems of form in electronic music, music as violence and sound as a weapon.
Source: Heinali's website
Nova Opera is a group of young Ukrainian artists the aim of which is search for new ways of developing of music theatre. It was founded by director Vlad Troitskyi in 2014. Musicians create the new synthetic genres and experiment with untypical music and stage performances.
The music language of the performances hasn’t got any aesthetic borders and freely unites avant-guard and rock, Gregorian choral and trip-hop, new baroque and folk improvisations. The vocal-instrumental ensemble of Nova Opera investigates possibilities of human voice and uses non-academic methods of playing music instruments such as prepared piano, bit-box, body-percussion and so on. The use of achievements of traditional theatre is mixed with the modern technologies: vj-ing and live-electronic music.
Creator: Oleksandr Popenko
Opera Aperta is a laboratory of contemporary opera, founded by ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. Opera Aperta is a search and testing of new ways of actual musical, compositional and instrumental theater, media opera, performative and interdisciplinary practices. The goal of the laboratory is to create a modern opera house in Kyiv, which will function as a multidisciplinary venue for modern baroque opera, dance theater and experimental musical genres.
Creator: Stefan Panfili
The Alter Ratio (lat. “different thinking”) contemporary music vocal ensemble was established in 2010. Performing solo and ensemble works of the 20th−21st centuries’ choral music, the ensemble strives to expand the boundaries of academic singing and to introduce non-traditional vocal techniques and stage experience. Alter Ratio is a school of alternative performance: flexible and agile, ready for everything new in the field of solo and choral singing, open to composer’s and director’s audacious experiments.
The ensemble’s mission consists in raising awareness of the wide audience on the best examples of academic music of the 20th-21st centuries, fostering the development and promotion of new Ukrainian academic music. The main direction of the ensemble’s activity is cooperation with contemporary composers and promoting their works.
Creator: Max Busel
Vitalii Kyianytsia performs contemporary classical music as a solo pianist, as well as chamber and orchestra music. He specialises in contemporary music from the mid-twentieth century to today, music by young composers, electroacoustic works, new improvisation, and free-jazz music, along with interdisciplinary art and music projects.
Since 2013 he has performed as a pianist with the Kyiv-based contemporary music ensemble Sed Contra Ensemble, of which he is a co-founder. The ensemble has since been involved with more than fifty musical initiatives in Ukraine and abroad. Between 2017 and 2018 he performed as a pianist with the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Since 2018 he has been a guest pianist of the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, and since 2019 he has performed with LUX:NM, a contemporary music ensemble in Berlin.
Creator: Anna Niedermeier
Orest Smovzh is a concert violinist and chamber musician. He is a member of various orchestras and also frequently performs solo violin recitals. Over the past twenty years of performing, he has played music with a wide repertoire, from Renaissance and Early Baroque to contemporary classical music. Over the past twelve years, Smovzh has commissioned or premiered around forty works by leading Ukrainian composers. In concerts, he combines 20th-century classics and newly-commissioned works with a more well-known repertoire as a way of offering a fresh perspective to the concert experience and to promote new music.
Creator: Elza Zherebchuk
Antonii Baryshevskyi is a solo pianist at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine. Baryshevskyi actively collaborates with living composers, premiering, recording, and integrating Ukrainian music in a global context. He also works with experimental improvisational music.
Creator: Valentyn Kuzan
Nazarii Stets is a Ukrainian double bassist who plays contemporary music. Нe was the first to perform seven new concertos for double bass with an orchestra. He has performed duets with violin, piano, clarinet, a soprano vocalist, as well as several solos for double bass. He has presented a number of works by Ukrainian composers in his own transcriptions for the double bass.
Stets’ first professional contract with the Halytskyi Chamber Orchestra came at the age of 16. At the age of 20 he won the soloist position in the Kyiv Kamerata national ensemble. At 26 years old he became a professor at the National Music Academy of Ukraine. In 2018 he was awarded the Levko Revutskyi prize for his concert performances of modern Ukrainian music by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine.
Creator: Tsuchiya Shigetoshi
Violinist Andrii Pavlov is a stand-out artist in Ukraine’s younger generation of musicians, not least because of his versatile, multifaceted performance style. His background is in classical music and in traditional violin repertoire, which over recent years has been enriched by a wide range of contemporary compositions (including works by Ukrainian composer) for solo violin, as well as chamber music.
Pavlov has performed with major Ukrainian orchestras, including the National Symphony, the Lviv Philharmonic, the Kyiv Soloists, and more. As a chamber musician, he is a part of Ukrainian ensembles Nostri Temporis, Sed Contra, Duo Sonoro, Danapris Quartet, Nota Bene Chamber Group, and is principal violinist of the New Era Orchestra. He is the prize winner of the Brahms, Salieri-Zanetti, and Plovdiv International Competitions.
@kravtsovslava_prod for VERE MUSIC FUND
Sed Contra Ensemble was founded in 2013 by Serhii Vilka, Vitalii Kyianytsia, and Andrii Merkhel, a group of young composers from Kyiv. The ensemble includes leading soloists and the winners of numerous international competitions. Sed Contra Ensemble’s repertoire focuses on chamber music from the early twentieth century to the present, music by young composers, electroacoustic music and new musical improvisation, as well as interdisciplinary artistic projects.
Sed Contra Ensemble is always on the line-up for major festivals in Ukraine, such as: GogolFest, Contrasts, Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, Two Days and Two Nights of New Music, Kyiv Music Fest, Lviv Hindemith Fest, Porto Franko, Musical Season Premieres, FreeFest, as well as Poznan Music Spring and Ukrainian Spring in Poland.
The ensemble has participated in international events, such as The Interaction of Dance and Music, ParaNoise, and EM-Visia, as well as in Alliance 22 and Donkult. Since 2015 Sed Contra Ensemble has collaborated with the Pechersk New Theatre in Kyiv and is involved in interdisciplinary projects with leading young artists. Their most important theatre performances have been Hesse. Parables as well as Sound. Voice. Silence with the Laboratory of Music and Theatre. The ensemble’s creative collaborations are on the border of visual, theatrical and musical arts, and its members also hold electroacoustic performances.
Creator: Oleksii Sokun
Kolomiiets is a solo oboist who has played with orchestras, Kyiv soloists, the Musica Camerata in Germany and is actively involved in arranging. Maksym is also known as the co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble Ensemble Nostri Temporis (2007), the founder of the baroque music ensemble Luna Ensemble (2014) and music curator at the Gogolfest (Kyiv) in the year 2017.
Creator: Sasha Pais
The Trio’s Secrets of Stradivarius tour of the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, and Kyiv was highly successful. Before the pandemic hit, they had plans to record composer Borys Liatoshynskyi’s works in summer 2020 and perform at music forums in Ukraine and Austria in the autumn. Violinist Mykhailo Zakharov is one of the co-founders of Ukraine’s Rare Instruments Foundation and promotes new opportunities to invest in classical music through the purchase of rare instruments for use by young musicians.
Source: press-photo
Violinist Bohdana Pivnenko has performed as a soloist with leading Ukrainian orchestras and has performed Ukrainian music at concerts in Ukraine and abroad. She regularly premieres works by modern Ukrainian composers, and some of these compositions are dedicated to her. Bohdana is an author and producer of the Anthology of Modern Ukrainian Music. Head of Violin and professor at the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine, she has also been recognised at international competitions such as the Ibla Grand Prize (Italy, 2016), the Interpreter Performers International Competition (Moldova, 1997), and the Mykola Lysenko International Competition (Kyiv, 1997). She is also a soloist with the Kyiv Kamerata national ensemble.
Source: Bohdana Pivnenko's Facebook page
Danapris String Quartet is a community of ambitious musicians whose mission is to create a new Ukrainian sound. Each quartet member is a distinguished artist with a remarkable musical career. They are united, first and foremost, by their interest in modern classical music and in their intention of expanding the horizons of the classical quartet performance.
The Danapris Quartet’s first performance was in June 2018 at the New Music Touchpoints festival in Lisbon, Portugal, where they presented works by recognised twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists, as well as premieres by young Ukrainian composers. They received a grant from the President of Ukraine and have used it to continue their popularisation of Ukrainian music.
Creator: Andrii Posonskyi
Ostap Manuliak’s preferred genre is electroacoustic music, and his work mostly concerns combining pre-made electronic beats and sounds, live electronic music, and sound processing acoustic instruments, controlled by motion sensors, in his performances and recordings.
From 2004 to 2017 he participated in numerous workshops led by composers such as Samuel Andreyev (Canada), Carola Bauckholt (Germany), Stefano Gervasoni (Italy), Dmitri Kourliandsky (Russia), Sergej Newsky (Russia-Germany), Serhii Piliutikov (Ukraine), Boguslaw Schäffer (Poland), Yuval Shaked (Israel), Martin Smolka (Czechia), Gerhard Stäbler (Germany), and Wojciech Widlak (Poland). During the 2018–19 academic year he was a visiting researcher at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustic (CCRMA) of Stanford University as a Fulbright fellow.
Creator: Bohdan Yemets
Kateryna Hryvul is a composer who writes contemporary classical music (acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic). Her music is original in that it combines specific timbres and abstract sounds within a clear structure of a musical form, and she inserts ideological and semantic references to modern society in her lyrics.
She has won numerous prizes in Lviv and Kyiv over the past few years, including the top prize for Music and Sound Design at the 2019 Power of Young competition in Kyiv, as well as the President of Ukraine grant for young writers and artists. Hryvul has also received several scholarships to master classes in contemporary and electroacoustic music composition to further her study.
Hyrvul has had lessons with many prominent composers, such as Clemens Gadenstätter (Austria), Martin Schutter (Germany), Jerzy Kornowicz (Poland), Jaime Reis (Portugal), Ake Parmerud (Sweden), Mehmet Can Ozer (Turkey), Stefan Prins (Belgium), Marcin Strzelecki (Poland), Sarah Nemtsov (Germany), Michael Schelle (USA), Richard Bellis (USA), Sławomir Wojciechowski (Poland), Annette Vande Gorne (Belgium), Thomas Gorbach (Austria) and many others.
Creator: Nika Gargol
The children’s choir Shchedryk was founded in 1971 in Kyiv by Iryna Sablina. Currently, more than 150 children of all different ages are involved with the choir. Shchedryk’s concert cast is composed of 50 or so of her best performers. The choir’s repertoire covers Renaissance music, baroque music, classical music, adaptations of Ukrainian and other national folk songs, and contemporary musical compositions.
The choir has received standing ovations in the most famous music halls all over the world, including (though not limited to) the Kyiv National Philharmonic of Ukraine; the Mozarteum in Salzburg; the Beethovenhalle in Bonn; the Roy Thomson in Toronto; the Gasteig in Munich; the Forum in Leverkusen; the Chamber Music Hall of the Berliner Philharmonic; the Musikaliska and Eric Ericsonhallen in Stockholm; the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory; the Musikverein and the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna.
Source: press-photo
Dudaryk, an acapella choir, was founded in 1971 by Mykola Katsal with the support of the Ukrainian Musical Association in Lviv, Ukraine. The choir school opened in 1989 and was the first choir school in independent Ukraine. Dudaryk has given more than 2500 concerts. It was awarded the Prize of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine (1983) and it is a Taras Shevchenko Prize winner (1989).
Source: Dudaryk's Facebook page
Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (YsOU) is a unique orchestra that brings together the most talented young musicians between the ages of 12-22 from all over Ukraine. It is a 21st-century orchestra made up of the first generation living under Ukrainian independence. YsOU was created in 2016 on the initiative of the Ukrainian internationally-renowned conductor Oksana Lyniv and with the support of three German partner institutions – Beethovenfest Bonn, the Bundesjugendorchester, and the Deutsche Welle, as well as the support of the International Festival of classical music LvivMozArt.
In the repertoire of the orchestra there are works of the world classics, however particular emphasis has been placed on the music of Ukrainian composers, such as Borys Liatoshynskyi, Vitalii Hubarenko, Yevhen Stankovych, Myroslav Skoryk, Zoltan Almashi, Bohdan Sehin.
Source: YSOU's Facebook page
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine – the successor of great traditions of the State Orchestra of Ukr.SSR and an object of great cultural and historical heritage value. The main principles of its development are publicity, active collaboration with partners and patrons, and an uncompromising faithfulness to the great ideals of classical art.
Source: press-photo
Kyiv Symphony Orchestra is a 40-year Ukrainian state orchestra that is currently undergoing a revolutionary renewal. A rare fusion of Ukrainian sensual musicality and Western analytical attitude to the text was born from the union of the orchestra with the Italian conductor Luigi Gaggero. The orchestra devotes special attention to the preservation and promotion of Ukrainian musical treasures.
