Vasyl Barvinsky / Galicians I

Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963)

Vasyl Barvinsky also began his musical studies with his mother, who was herself a pupil of Karol Mikuli, the director of the Lemberg Conservatory in Galicia.  Vasyl studied at the Lemberg Conservatory and, from 1908 to 1914, was a pupil of Vitezslav Novák in Prague.  Barvinsky became the director of the Lysenko Institute in Lviv after Stanyslav Liudkevych was drafted into the Austrian army.

 As a pianist, Barvinsky toured Soviet Ukraine in 1928 with cellist Bohdan Berezhnytsky.

When the Soviets merged the Lemberg conservatory in Galicia with the Lysenko institute, it was Barvinsky who was appointed director of the new Lviv State Conservatory.  Privilege, however, was short-lived.

 In 1948, intrigue led to denunciation and Barvinsky was exiled to a labour camp in the Mordovian ASSR.  All his music scores were publically burned!  Barvinsky returned to Lviv in 1958 a broken man and spent the rest of his days unsuccessfully trying to recreate his lost works.  The surviving art songs are representative of the composer’s post-romantic and often impressionistic style.

Jaroslav Lopatynsky / Galicians II

Jaroslav Lopatynsky (1871 – 1936)

By profession a doctor, Jaroslav composed over 100 art songs.  He possessed an exquisite talent to express, in few bars, our deepest felt feelings; humorous in the extreme, reflective, dramatic, and always melodic. 

Jaroslav studied medicine in Vienna for 7 years and during this time fully immersed himself in musical Viennese life.  Here he composed his first art songs. which remain his greatest contribution to Ukrainian National Music.  The onset of the 1st World War precluded Jaroslav from developing his extraordinary talents yet further into the symphonic genre.  However, his talents were proclaimed by Ukraine’s most eminent composers, notably Stanyslav Liudkevych and Vasyl Barvinsky. 

Stanyslav Liudkevych / Galicians I

Stanyslav Liudkevych (1879-1979)

Stanyslav Liudkevych first studied composition with his mother who herself was a pupil of Mykhailo Verbytsky, the composer of Ukraine’s national anthem.  While at university, Liudkevych was a student of Mieczyslaw Soltys at the Lemberg Conservatory.  In Vienna, he studied with Alexander Zemlinsky, Hermann Gradener, and Guido Adler; he also attended Hugo Riemann’s lectures in Germany.  

In 1908, he succeeded Anatole Vakhnianyn as director of the Lysenko Institute.  During World War I, Liudkevych was drafted into the Austrian army.  Captured by the Russians, he spent time in Kazakhstan as a prisoner of war.  In 1919, he resumed work at the institute in Lviv.

In 1936, Liudkevych became head of the musicological commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. From 1940 to 1972, he taught at the Lviv State Conservatory.  Despite being a 20th-century composer, Liudkevych maintained a post-romantic palette that was later tempered by Soviet neo-folklorism.  In fact, under the Soviet regime his creative output dwindled.  At one of the first meetings with the Communist Party in 1939, the composer is reputed to have quipped, “liberated [by the Communists]—there’s nothing one can do about that…

Mykola Lysenko

MYKOLA LYSENKO (1842–1912)

Mykola Lysenko is the father of modern Ukrainian classical music.  His prolific life’s work laid the foundation for the further development and expansion of Ukrainian musical culture. He influenced a large group of Ukrainian composers, including Stetsenko, Stepovyi, Leontovych, Koshyts, and Liudkevych. A compilation of Lysenko’s works in 22 volumes was published in Kyiv in 1950–59.

Lysenko was a composer, ethnomusicologist, pianist, and conductor. He studied at the Kharkiv and Kyiv universities and, later, at the Leipzig Conservatory under Reinicke and Richter (1867–69). From 1874 to 1876 he studied orchestration under Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg. In 1904, he founded his own School of Music and Drama in Kyiv.

The list of Lysenko’s operatic compositions include Black Sea Cossacks (1872); three operas based on the works of the Ukrainian writer Mykola Hohol – Christmas Night (1873–82),
The Drowned Maiden (1883) and Taras Bulba (1890); and the operettas Natalka from Poltava (1889) and Aeneas (1911).  Himself a well-known pianist, Lysenko composed a piano sonata, two rhapsodies, a suite, a scherzo and a rondo, as well as an abundance of smaller pieces, including songs without words, nocturnes, waltzes and polonaises. He also wrote a number of works for strings. Of the Ukrainian composers, Lysenko was the most committed to the art song genre. Lysenko’s 133 art songs (lirychni pisni in Ukrainian) relate a wonderfully descriptive and passionate story of 19th- and early 20th-century European life.

Nestor Nyzhankivsky / Galicians II

Nestor Nyzhankivsky (1893 – 1940)

After a few compositions in the style of 19th century Galician Song where the melody in the voice was paramount,  Nestor’s primary aim in composing Ukrainian Art Songs became ‘...the synthesis of  National and European musical traditions to further develop Ukrainian musical culture...’  He strived to exhault the expressive powers of the piano to create a true marriage of two instruments. Thus, his later songs are much enriched with a dialogue for piano and voice.  In the 19th century, the piano was often a mere ‘accompanist’ to much of the art song tradition.  Nestor’s style further developed after having emigrated from Ukraine to Vienna in 1920; explosive recitatives, even disputes between piano and voice – an unsettling yet riveting musical experience.

Ostap Nyzhankivsky / Galicians II

Ostap Nyzhankivsky (1863 – 1919)

Ostap, the father of Nestor, was one of the most prominent figures in the musical life of late 19th century Halychyna (Galicia), Western Ukraine.  In 1885, he founded the ‘Musical Library’ Publishing House which was instrumental in the publication of many works by Ukraine’s most prominent and promising composers. Ostap helped popularise the piano in Western Ukraine, particularly as a solo instrument, but also as an accompanist to Ukrainian Art Song.  He adopted Western European Romanticism in his songs - highly provocative, dramatic, sometimes sharply disturbing settings.  He achieved much recognition for his compositions of choral music; of most particularly note: ‘Huljaly’ (‘They Partied) for male voices; a highly dramatic argument ensues causing unrest among friends! For Ostap the word was paramount and thus great music ensued.

Yakiv Stepovyi

From Imperial choirboy to Soviet composer, much of the life story of Yakiv Stepovyi is lost in the historic upheavals that ravaged Ukraine in the 20th century. Even so, Stepovyi’s legacy of art songs, piano pieces, and other vocal works survives almost intact. It reveals a composer who could adapt to changes in politics, culture, and society. His eclectic preludes and other ephemeral piano pieces give way, after WWI, to revolutionary mass songs and arrangements for bandura, a lute-like Ukrainian folk instrument. But there was one constant in Stepovyi’s life: the art song. Each one is an uncompromising declaration of the composer’s artistic ideal. Stepovyi was one of the first modern Ukrainian composers to avoid the direct use of folk material. He sought to transform the traditional language of music into a new modernist idiom and thus create a new national identity.  

Yakiv Yakymenko (pseudonym Stepovyi) was born in the city of Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was a poor, retired non-commissioned officer. In 1886, Yakiv’s older brother, composer Fedir Yakymenko (aka Theodore Akimenko), was sent to the Imperial Chapel as a choirboy. Nine years later, Yakiv joined him there in St. Petersburg. Within three years, Yakiv's voice broke and he was forced to leave the choir. Somehow he managed to continue his music studies. A year later, in 1899, he composed the liturgical Cherubic Hymn, opus 1. Then, in 1902, Fedir arranged an interview for his younger brother with Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Both Russian composers were so impressed with Yakiv’s talent that they allowed him to study part-time for free at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The studies lasted for twelve years, until 1914, when Stepovyi finally graduated....

Denys Sichynsky / Galicians I

Denys Sichynsky (1865-1909)

In his youth, Denys Sichynsky studied with pianist Wladyslaw Wszelaczynski in Ternopil.  Wszelaczynskiwas a pupil of Karol Mikuli, the director of the Lemberg Conservatory in Galicia.  Prior to his private studies with Mikuli, Sichynsky had already started to write art songs.  

During the 1890s Sichynsky led an unsettled life.  He worked as a music teacher, copyist, arranger, conductor, performer, organizer, critic, and composer.  It is from this period that most of his art songs originate.  In 1891 Sichynsky helped found the Lviv “Boian” Choir and, in 1902, he organized a Ukrainian music school in Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) where he settled during the last decade of his life.  

Stylistically, Sichynsky’s music is mid-late romantic.  There is a wonderful sense of melody, reflecting the melos of Ukrainian folksongs.  Many of his art songs are through-composed, rich in modulation, and operatic in style.

Kyrylo Stetsenko

Kyrylo Stetsenko (1882 - 1922)

Joy and sorrow embrace the art songs of Kyrylo Stetsenko. Tsarist repression, revolution, censorship, exile and war are their companions.  Only a free spirit like Stetsenko could survive the times and create songs of unsurpassed beauty, inner strength and delicate intimacy.  The songs display a stunning array of changing emotions-from impassioned patriotism, bitter irony and cruel disappointment to hopeful yearning, ardent love and peaceful reflection.  

There are moments of epic timelessness, mystic invocation, heroic struggle and domestic bliss.  These are songs that express Ukraine's poetic soul through the universal language of music.  Kyrylo Stetsenko was born in central Ukraine. His father was a painter of icons and his maternal uncle was an Orthodox priest. At age 10, Kyrylo was taken by his uncle to Kyiv to study art.  There, he enrolled at Saint Sophia's Church School and later at the Seminary.  In school Kyrylo studied the masters of Ukrainian church music Dmytro Bortniansky, Maksym Berezovsky, Artem Vedel, and others. He also met Mykola Lysenko, the most important Ukrainian composer of the time, and participated in several ethnomusicological expeditions.  Completing his studies in 1903, Stetsenko chose not to become a priest.  Instead, he began working as a music teacher, music critic, church conductor and composer.  

Stefania Turkewich / Galicians I

Stefania Turkewich (1898-1977)       

Ukraine’s first woman composer is Stefania Turkewich.  She began her music studies with her mother, who was a pupil of Karol Mikuli, the director of the Lemberg Conservatory in Galicia. Then, at the Lysenko Institute in Lviv, she was taught by Vasyl Barvinsky.  After World War I, Turkewicz studied in Lviv with Adolf Chybinski at the Lviv University, and also at the Lysenko conservatory. She then moved to Austria and studied with Guido Adler at the University of Vienna and Joseph Marx at the music academy.

 In 1925, she travelled with her first husband to Berlin where she studied with Franz Schreker and the influential expressionist, Arnold Schoenberg; in Prague she studied with Zdenek Nejedly at Charles University, with Otakar Sin at the conservatory, and with Vitezslav Novak at the music academy.  She received her doctorate in musicology in 1934.  From 1935 to 1939, she taught harmony and piano at the Lysenko Institute in Lviv, and, from 1940 to 1944, she lectured at the Lviv State Conservatory.

 Fleeing from the Soviets, Turkewich immigrated to England with her second husband in 1946.  There she spent much of her time composing, but many of her works have never been performed.  Stylistically they are much more modern, but still hearken back to Ukrainian folksongs, when they are not post-romantic, atonal or expressionistic in character.

Myroslav Volynsky / Galicians II

Myroslav Volynsky (1955 -)

A student of composition at Lviv Conservatoire under Anatol’ Kos-Anatol’sky, (a composer of note whose art songs are to be recorded by the Ukrainian Art Song Project), Myroslav has to date composed for all musical genres – operatic, symphonic, oratorio and chamber music.  His art songs range from intimate miniatures to grandiose expressions of epic dimensions - a true challenge for piano and voice. Myroslav’s immediate influences range from Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler to Borys Lyatoshynsky, Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich.  A delight for the performer to perform; a delight for the listener to witness such sophisticated and groundbreaking music...listen out for the lapses into ‘Tango’!!!