Deliberate Earlier than Struggle, a Competition Embraces New Ukrainian Music

Deliberate Earlier than Struggle, a Competition Embraces New Ukrainian Music

The Ukrainian Up to date Music Competition returned for its third version this weekend, with a slate of works associated to themes of nature and mythology. Throughout an introduction at Merkin Corridor, the viewers was advised that whereas the occasion might have turn out to be newly related in latest weeks, its spirit remained unchanged. (Certainly, it was deliberate lengthy earlier than the Russian invasion.)

But the warfare loomed over these performances: Some artists couldn’t depart Ukraine, and the live shows had been tailored to accommodate their absences. And the pageant’s very existence has at all times been a rejection of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s assertion that there isn’t any actual Ukrainian tradition.

Our critics had been at two of the three packages: “Forest Track” on Friday, and “Anthropocene” on Sunday.

The pageant’s first live performance was a travelogue via the timber, fields and mountains of Ukraine: an agriculture-rich panorama that has impressed the months of the nation’s calendar; been the topic of Hitler’s envy; and suffered beneath trendy disasters like Chernobyl and the latest invasion.

A number of the works had been transcription-like tributes. Ivan Nebesnyy’s “Air Music 1” (2001-04), paired the vocal group Ekmeles with 4 flutes and Sean Statser — the night’s busiest participant, on percussion — for variations of prolonged method that rendered fully human one thing intangible. The percussion’s lingering last observe was a reminder of how indebted music, or any sound, has at all times been to air.

There was imitation, too, in Zoltan Almashi’s “An Echo From Hitting the Trunk of a Dry Mountain Spruce in Rycerko Gorna Village” (2015), whose ready piano recalled the tapping of a lifeless tree. A slowly screeching violin was like a bending department; the clarinet, a melancholy folks tune carried out in its shadow. And Ostap Manulyak’s “Timber,” from 2012, was an arboreal examination from the bottom up, with ever-higher pitches airily performed by a violin and cello the place their strings meet the tailpiece — and, on the prime, piano tinkling like birdsong.

The opposite two items had been extra summary, and extra haunting. Anastasia Belitska’s “Rusalochka” (2019), a purely digital work of distorted discovered audio from the Chernobyl zone, recounted a standard Mermaid’s Easter celebration as warped because the ecosystem there. Alla Zahaykevych’s “Nord/Ouest” (2010) completed a lot of the identical, its search of vanishing folklore in northwestern Ukraine documented over 50 discursive minutes whose flashes of folks track — in voice and violin — felt like valuable discoveries.

“Nord/Ouest” usually options percussion, voices and dwell electronics. However, as a result of its creators couldn’t depart Ukraine, it was reworked on Friday for Statser, alone together with his drum package, subsequent to a laptop computer carrying the sounds of his fellow performers. This spectacle, just like the music’s ghostly dispatches from a fading historical past, spoke for itself. JOSHUA BARONE

Sunday afternoon’s program, too, was disrupted: Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, the composers who had deliberate to carry out their post-apocalyptic “Chornobyldorf Partita” on the second half of the live performance, couldn’t journey to New York. In order that they despatched a 45-minute movie, a variety from a seven-hour efficiency of “Mariupol” that they streamed on March 16 from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, the place they’re sheltering.

Conceived as a brand new a part of “Chornobyldorf Partita” and named after town at the moment beneath siege, “Mariupol” is written for dulcimer and a microtonally retuned bandura, a lutelike folks instrument. The 2 males sat going through one another, their devices practically touching, the bandura’s strings going through up just like the dulcimer’s.

With each devices struck with drum sticks, the sound developed from a rustling metallic crunch to a shimmering coppery drone to clattering, astringent industrial noise. This was defiant, ritualistic music — aggressive and forlorn, however with poignant heat from its creation as a duo.

On the primary half of this system, the pianist Steven Beck performed Alexey Shmurak’s “Greenland” (2020-21), a mirrored image on one other disaster, that of the planet’s local weather. Within the Minimalistic first two sections, repeating figures labored via gradual however surprising transformations, usually turning — thawing — from chilly to warmly nocturnal and again once more and, within the opening “Railway Étude,” taking up a number of the relaxed swing of a rag. By far the longest part of this 45-minute work is the third and last one, “Icy Variations,” which stretches a Bach-style chorale theme to glacial expansiveness, wandering via delicate, natural shifts. ZACHARY WOOLFE

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