DATELINE NEW YORK: Echoes of Ukrainian melodies (05/10/98)

DATELINE NEW YORK: Echoes of Ukrainian melodies

by Helen Smindak

Three recent musical events (two of them outside the Ukrainian community) brought attention to a very significant fact - there is a wealth of Ukrainian-inspired music out there, pleasing the ears and teasing the fantasies of music lovers around the world.

I refer not only to direct Ukrainian borrowings, but to Ukrainian musical elements in general - melodic phrases, themes and folklore, as well as actual lyrics and music - which have directly or subliminally influenced non-Ukrainian composers. Often mistakenly identified or referred to as Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Gypsy - even Turkish - the Ukrainian components exist in a multitude of compositions, reflecting the charm of Ukrainian folk melodies and lyrics.

We all know, of course, about the derivation of the popular Christmas song "Carol of the Bells;" it came to these shores with the Koshetz Ukrainian National Choir as the New Year carol "Shchedryk." And who has not heard the 17th century folk song "Oy Ne Khody, Hrytsiu" (Don't Go, Gregory) - either the English version by Russian-American Gregory Stanley, the orchestral score by the Decameron Orchestra, or Liszt's use of the melody in his piano suite "Glanes de Woronince" (Harvest at Voronyntsi), or Jack Lawrence's light version titled "Yes, My Darling Daughter," recorded by Dinah Shore and other popular American singers, as well as by the big-dance bands of Benny Goodman and Glen Miller?

Musicologist Roman Sawycky of New Jersey, who made a scholarly survey of the "Hryts" theme and variations in one of his "Sounds and Views" column in The Weekly in 1984, points to other manifestations of the Hryts ballad. It was arranged by Alois Jedlicks, a Ukrainian composer of Czech descent; printed in a Russian songbook; translated into Polish, Czech, German and English and widely performed in Ukrainian by the opera and concert soprano Marcella Sembrich.

Yakov Soroker's monograph "Ukrainian Musical Elements in Classical Music" (published in 1995 by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press in Edmonton and Toronto) also attests to the widespread popularity of the Hryts ballad. Mr. Soroker, a Bessarabian by birth who held the chair of music history and theory at the Ivan Franko Pedagogical Institute in Drohobych, Ukraine, from 1962 to 1976, noted that Semen Klymovsky's song "Yikhav Kozak za Dunai" (The Kozak Rode beyond the Danube) was equally well known. The song or its melodic refrain occur in works by Beethoven, Hummel, Weber and the Polish composers Franciszek Lessel and Henryk Wienawski. According to Mr. Sawycky, the Kozak song was used also by George Gershwin and Herbert Stothart for the soprano and tenor duet, "Don't Forget Me," in the 1925 operetta "Song of the Flame" (made into a film in 1930).

In his musical quest, Mr. Soroker examined 9,077 melodies in Zinovii Lysko's 10-volume collection of folk songs from Eastern Europe "Ukrayinski Narodni Melodiyi" (Ukrainian Folk Melodies, New York, Jersey City and Toronto: 1967-1986), and studied 500 other folk melodies as well. His list of world-famous classical composers who were drawn to the riches of Ukrainian folk music includes Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and other German, Austrian and Hungarian composers. Polish composers such as Chopin and Karol Szymanowski, and many Russian (several of whom were of Ukrainian descent) composers, including Mussorgsky, Glière, Rimsky-Korsakov, Serov, Prokofiev, Glinka and Tchaikovsky (who, technically, was of Ukrainian ancestry).

Add to this line-up Mr. Sawycky's American discoveries of Charles Loeffler, Quincy Porter, Nikolai Berezovsky, Halsey Stevens, Kurt Schindler and Efrem Zimbalist, among others, and you can easily see that there was an abundant supply of Ukrainian-inspired works to choose from when the Ukrainian Institute of America, the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra planned their 1998 spring programs.

A rare program

The original version of Charles Martin Loeffler's suite "Les Vieilles de l'Ukraine" (Evenings in Ukraine), an 1891 work based on the short stories of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol), was heard in a rare program presented by the Ukrainian Institute's Chamber Music Society. The late winter concert, held at the Institute's historic mansion at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, also included selections from Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Hummel and Beethoven, all based on Ukrainian themes.

Performing the third and fourth movements of "Ukrainian Evenings," violinist Alex Kirillov and pianist Vyacheslav Bakis brought out the work's bright harmonies and exuberant folk humor, evolving the contentment of a quiet evening and the jolly carousing of village lads.

Pianist Mykola Suk, artistic director of the Music at the Institute series, offered a highly sensitive presentation of Franz Liszt's "Ballade d'Ukraine." Part of the set "Glances de Woronince," the lovely ballad with its rippling passages and dark, moody sections recreates the tragic love story known to us as the folk song "Don't Go, Gregory," attributed to the Kozak songstress Marusia Churai.

Soprano Oksana Krovytska made excellent use of her fine voice admired by New York City Opera audiences to interpret the brooding and sorrowful moods of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Three Romances" - monologues by Taras Shevchenko dealing with the theme of fate, set in free Russian translations by Aleksei Pleshcheyev and Ivan Bunin.

Johan Nepomuk Hummel's delightful treatment of "The Kozak Rode Beyond the Danube" (a work, in Mr. Sawycky's estimation, whose richness of color, ornamentation and dynamic motion make it superior to the Beethoven chamber piece on the same tune) was heard in Trio for Flute, Cello and Piano, Op. 78. The piano, with Mr. Bakis at the keyboard, took the spotlight, while guest flutist Maria Elena Tobon and cellist Volodymyr Panteleyev added their superb talents to a polished production.

Beethoven received his share of attention with the Leontovych String Quartet's splendid performance of his Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3. Part of a cycle commissioned by, and dedicated to, Count (later Prince) Andrii Rozumovsky of Ukraine, who served as Russia's ambassador to Austria-Hungary, the work is referred to as the Razumovsky Quartet (the Ukrainian name Rozumovsky is often spelled with an "a" outside Ukraine). Two themes resembling Ukrainian songs occur in the work: one, a repeating augmented second (an interval which Mr. Soroker has found to be characteristic of the Ukrainian idiom), and two, a theme reminiscent of the vesnianka (spring welcoming song).

The Leontovych ensemble included violinists Yuriy Mazurkevich and Yuriy Kharenko, violist Borys Deviatov, and Mr. Panteleyev on cello.

A distinctive jewel in the Ukrainian Institute's excellent music series, this outstanding evening was billed as "Ukrainian Themes in Western Music" and sponsored by the Self-Reliance (N.Y.) Federal Credit Union. The event drew an overflow audience, a fitting tribute to the year's planning and preparation handled by Mr. Suk, Mr. Sawycky and Music at the Institute executive director Dr. Taras Shegedyn.

Taras Bulba in Brooklyn

The Kyiv-born composer and conductor Rheinhold Glière, of Belgian Jewish descent, was professor and director of the Kyiv Conservatory of Music from 1913 to 1920. Glière is credited with editing and orchestrating Ukrainian operettas and the cantata "Shevchenkovi" (To Shevchenko), and rewriting the orchestration for Hulak-Artemovsky's opera "Zaporozhets za Dunayem" (Zaporozhian Kozak Beyond the Danube).

Glière's 500 compositions include the symphonic tableau "Zaporozhtsi," a musical recreation of Ilya Repin's famous painting of the Kozaks writing a letter to the Turkish sultan; "Zapovit" (Testament), a symphonic poem dedicated to Shevchenko, which begins with the well-known song composed by Hordiy Hladky to Shevchenko's poem "Zapovit," and the ballet "Taras Bulba."

Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater to mark the centenary of writer Gogol's death, Glière's "Taras Bulba Ballet Suite" (1952) depicts a towering figure drawn from Ukrainian folk mythology - Taras Bulba, the hero of one of Gogol's short stories, based on the author's observations and memories of life in Ukraine.

The suite was the opening selection in the concert presented at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts by the touring Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra, which has achieved unique federal status in Ukraine under the direction of the dynamic young American director Hobart Earle.

Mr. Earle chose the Glière work because the score abounds with Ukrainian folk songs such as "Spin, My Spinner" (heard in the first movement, "The Kozaks Ride Forth to the Zaporozhian Sich") and music borrowed by the composer from his symphonic picture of 1927, "The Zaporozhian Kozaks" (used in the final scene).

Despite the afternoon's unusually high temperatures, for March 29, the 100-piece orchestra showed its mettle in recreating vivid events by performing five excerpts from the ballet. With auditorium doors wide open on three sides, the musicians gave a professional and masterful depiction of Kozaks riding off to their Sich stronghold, the boundless Ukrainian steppes, a whirlwind Hopak, and a grand adagio, ending with the Zaporozhian dance.

Two works without Ukrainian folk references were included in the program - Prokofiev's youthful Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D-flat Major, Op. 10 and Rachmaninoff's monumental Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27. The soloist for the Prokofiev concerto was Brooklyn-born Steven Lubin, a many-faceted musician with an international performing career, who revealed at a post-concert reception that his mother came from the Kyiv area of Ukraine.

The Odesa orchestra debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1993. It has achieved critical acclaim in many countries, and since 1995 has initiated a series of CDs on the ASV label of previously unrecorded Ukrainian works.

Mr. Earle, the first U.S. citizen to be appointed to the post of principal guest conductor of an orchestra in Ukraine (in 1991), became music director in 1992. He is also the first foreigner to be awarded the status of Distinguished Artist of Ukraine.

Childhood memories

In an April program titled "The Music Romance of Childhood," the American Symphony Orchestra opened with Charles Martin Loeffler's composition "Memories of My Childhood," a work created in Loeffler's 64th year that looks back on three years of his childhood in the Ukrainian village of Smila near Kyiv. Also presented in the program at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall were Edward Elgar's "The Wand of Youth," Suite No. 1, Op. 1a and Richard Strauss's "Symphonia Domestica," Op. 53. ASO's renowned music director, Leon Botstein, was at the podium.

While his father was director of a sugar factory from 1869 to 1872, Mr. Loeffler enjoyed a happy stay in Ukraine, compared to the family's return to Germany, where his father's resistance to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck brought him imprisonment and death.

"Memories" is a series of lush impressions - the sound of church bells, alternating pensive and playful scenes, and vignettes of fairy tales and dance-songs. Writing in the ASO publication "Dialogues & Extensions," Carol J. Oja of the College of William and Mary, observes: "The reeds deliver plaintive minor tunes with an Eastern European cast, the strings soar, the surfaces glimmer, and the work fades off into hazy introspection." The 13-minute tone poem ends with power chords that commemorate the death of an elderly peasant, a story-teller, singer and maker of willow pipes who was the friend and companion of the young Loeffler.

After emigrating to the Untied States in 1881, Mr. Loeffler became a much-respected violinist, first with Leopold Damrosch's orchestra in New York and later with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. "Memories of My Childhood," which took first prize at a competition sponsored by the North Shore Festival Association in Evanston, Ill., was given its premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1924 and was subsequently performed by orchestras around the country.