DATELINE NEW YORK: The season's opening events (09/21/97)

DATELINE NEW YORK: The season's opening events

by Helen Smindak

The 1997-1998 Ukrainian cultural season in New York got off to a splendid start last weekend with two special receptions, one at The Ukrainian Museum to mark the opening of an exhibition of folk costumes and textiles from the Sokal region in northwestern Ukraine, the other at the Ukrainian Institute of America, kicking off a dual anniversary that will be celebrated throughout the entire season - the 50th anniversary of the institute's beginning in 1948 and the centennial of its landmark Fifth Avenue home.

Some 200 persons gathered at the institute on Saturday for an evening of convivial conversation, wine and hors d'oeuvres with pleasant music on the side. The institute has 400 members and all will undoubtedly become involved in some way in this season's outstanding programs, which begin the weekend of October 24-25 with an exhibit of Zenon Onyshkevych's oil paintings and The Music at the Institute's first concert of the year, featuring Shubert compositions.

With construction of The Ukrainian Museum's new building on East Sixth Street due to begin in November, museum officials and staffers are finalizing plans for the blessing of the cornerstone on November 2. (Plans for construction of the new $5 million building were reported recently in a New York Times story, with an artist's rendering of the three-story red brick building.) Meanwhile, business continues as usual at the brownstone at 203 Second Ave., where three floors have housed a good part of the museum's collections of folk art, fine art, and an archive of photos and documents for 20 years.

A village remembered

Secluded in a Buh River valley where the Ukrainian provinces of Volyn, Halychyna and Kholm rub shoulders, the village of Uhryniv developed its folk ways and quiet, orderly life from the time of the Kyivan Rus' era, a life which in the 18th and 19th centuries was built around St. Michael Ukrainian Catholic Church and close interaction between parishioners and pastors.

Tragedy struck in 1947. The village, part of Polish-occupied western Ukraine, was swept up in the Polish government's political action "Akcja Wisla." The villagers, who called themselves Vihrynivtsi and their village Vihryniv, were forcibly resettled with thousands of neighboring Ukrainians in other parts of Poland, while some fled to areas of Ukraine. Border negotiations between Poland and the Soviet Union made Uhryniv part of Soviet Ukraine, and its name was changed to Dibrivka. To all appearances, Uhryniv and its inhabitants had disappeared from the face of the earth.

And it might have stayed that way, were it not for the persistent work of a former resident who now lives in the United States. Iryna Kashubynsky of Parma, Ohio, made a pilgrimage in 1972 to her native Uhryniv and areas where its inhabitants had been resettled, and determined to collect and preserve Uhryniv folk art.

Ms. Kashubynsky has been traveling to Poland and Ukraine every three years, visiting the few older people who had returned to Uhryniv and locating resettled natives of the village. Through intensive work she assembled and catalogued more than 150 items of Uhryniv's treasures - folk costumes, footwear, accessories, and embroidered and woven textiles.

Ms. Kashubynsky's trove of Uhryniv folk art is currently being displayed by The Ukrainian Museum at 203 Second Ave. in an exhibition titled "The Preservation of a Heritage: The Village of Uhryniv of the Sokal Region." The collection is augmented by shirts and Sokal Easter eggs from the museum's folk art collection, ceramics on loan from the Ukrainian Diocesan Museum and Library of Stamford, Conn., and pysanky recreated with Sokal floral ornamentation by Tanya Osadca of Troy, Ohio.

The Uhryniv artifacts, which Ms. Kashubynsky acquired as gifts or by purchase, include men's and women's attire, ritual cloths, bed covers, kerchiefs and aprons. Most interesting in the Sokal costume is the woman's shirt, with its wide collar and cuffs, especially the black floral embroidery (although there are many shirts with multi-colored motifs as well). Recalling festivals and holidays in the exhibit catalogue, Ms. Kashubynsky writes: "how beautifully the white sleeves and collars of women's shirts, with black embroidery, looked against the background of black vests, and my heart is heavy with sadness that everything is gone, as if in a dream, and will never come back."

Similar thoughts and images were voiced at the exhibition opening by Ms. Kashubynsky and the museum's folk-art curator, Lubow Wolynetz, bringing tears to many eyes. Later, Ms. Kashubynsky and her sister, Stefania Cehelsky of Florida, both smartly turned out in ecru linen dresses featuring Uhryniv black embroidery, were surrounded by friends and well-wishers eager to learn more about Uhryniv and its folk art.

The collector, born into a priestly family (her father, grandfather and great-grandfather were pastors of St. Michael Church), acquired a fascination for Uhryniv folk embroidery early in life as well as a zeal for teaching school children, preparing concerts and stage productions, lecturing and promoting the work of civic organizations in Ukraine. While living in a displaced persons' camp in Regensburg, Germany, after the war, she received a degree in agrarian engineering from the Ukrainian Technical Institute. She came to the U.S. in 1949 and became active in various Ukrainian emigre organizations, concentrating most of her time and energy on promoting and completing projects and undertakings for the Ukrainian National Women's League of America.

"The Preservation of a Heritage" collection will remain on display through February. Museum hours are 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.

A modern-day kobzar

Oleh Mahlay is a practicing attorney working for the state of Ohio in the Cleveland area. He serves on the board of the Ukrainian Cultural Arts Association of Greater Cleveland (Kashtan Dance Ensemble and School), sings with the Choral Arts Association of Cleveland, teaches voice and bandura, and frequently lectures and conducts bandura workshops in northeast Ohio and throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has served as the choir director of St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Parma, Ohio, and has put in time as the assistant conductor of the Parma Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he has had a long association with the bandura summer camp in Emlenton, Pa., serving as conductor, lecturer and music director.

From this array of titles and positions, one would guess that Mr. Mahlay must be a person of middle age. On the contrary. He is 27, and dark-haired, handsome and high-powered to boot. What's more, he is also the artistic director and conductor of the famed Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America, a position he took on in 1996 at the age of 26, making him the youngest artistic director in the chorus's 77-year history.

He says he's very happy to be able to work with law and music - both of them "stimulate different hemispheres of my mind." He was brought up with bandura music "from day one," hearing it played by his two older brothers and by Hryhoriy Kytasty, a close family friend who frequently came to dinner at the Mahlay home. Beginning piano studies at age 5 and violin lessons soon after, he went on to earn high marks and prizes in piano competitions in his teens, and became choir director of St. Vladimir Cathedral at age 16. A magna cum laude graduate of Case Western Reserve University, where he majored in music history and literature, he studied voice and piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music and attended the Bolzano International Institute of Music in Italy. A member of the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus since 1989, he served as concertmaster in 1991-1992, becoming assistant conductor and a member of the artistic commission in 1992.

Interviewed by "Dateline" during one of his frequent trips to New York to conduct a rehearsal with chorus members who reside in the northeast, Mr. Mahlay explained that this method allows him to get to know the voices better on an individual basis, "so we don't waste time when everyone gets together."

"As we get closer to a recording date or tour, we bring the New York contingent to Detroit more often, but by that time everyone knows the music, and we're just fine-turning it," he added.

The chorus has 45 members, with singers and bandurists located in the New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto areas, and two members living in Edmonton. With the exception of Petro Kytasty, the only remaining member of the bandura group that emigrated from a German refugee camp to the United States in 1949, they form a contingent of mostly young bandurists who were born in the U.S. and Canada; many of them received their training at bandura workshops in Emlenton, Pa., and London, Ontario.

With young people in the ranks and at the helm, new goals are being visualized for the chorus. Mr. Mahlay said he and his associates have a long-term plan to make the organization stronger "by opening the doors to non-Ukrainians" - getting them involved on an organizational level, sitting on the board, for instance. We'd like to make the chorus more than just a good Ukrainian arts institution; our ideal is a good arts institution that happens to be Ukrainian and that's in the U.S."

The chorus co-sponsors the Emlenton and London workshops, which produce new members for the group and also generate new workshops, like the women's folk workshop held annually in Cleveland, he said.

Hoping to extend the role of the chorus, not just as a performing group but as "a kind of bandura mecca outside Ukraine," the organization schedules performances at university campuses, offering a package that includes a lecture-demonstration for conservatory students and a concert that will attract students, teaching staff and alumni.

On the drawing board are designs for new zhupany, or Kozak topcoats, for chorus members; a new logo is in the works for letterheads, press kits and CDs.

The concert program that will be heard next month during the East Coast tour in the U.S. and Canada will also have a fresh slant: compositions by young bandurists who came up through the ranks, a work by a contemporary female composer in Ukraine, some old songs done by the chorus in the '50s that will be new to the younger generation, and a segment featuring bandura soloists as they perform in the traditional manner of the ancient kobzars.

The Town Hall concert in New York is scheduled for October 5 at 2 p.m. Holding his bandura, Mr. Mahlay will be seated on stage in the center of the front row of bandurists. Like his mentor, the late composer/bandurist and longtime artistic director Hryhoriy Kytasty, he will begin proceedings with a nod of his head.

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