SOUNDS AND VIEWS: Kosenko at the institute (05/10/98)

SOUNDS AND VIEWS

by Roman Sawycky

Kosenko at the institute

As part of its concert series, "Music at the Institute" on March 18 presented pianist and musicologist Juliana Osinchuk in a program titled "Anthologies - Works of Viktor Kosenko."

The series is sponsored by the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York, with Mykola Suk, artistic director, and Dr. Taras Shegedyn, executive director. By maintaining high performance standards, the series has grown into an important and permanent artistic presence in the tri-state metropolitan area.

The evening provided the audience with the opportunity to see and hear the results of a comprehensive study of Kosenko by the featured artist, who on this occasion, apart from providing illuminating background information, chose Kosenko's own idiom - the piano- as a means of expression.

It's high time that the work of this major composer have exposure outside of the capitals of Eastern Europe. As early as 1954, musicology reference books (e.g., Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) noted Kosenko's ties to the Western- European romantic tradition. A graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Kosenko, rather than follow a distinctly national school, showed a preference for neo-classical composition combined with late romanticism, to which he added a personal elegiac style that often precipitated into dramatically massive sound.

Widely recognized as a gifted pianist, Kosenko's compositions display a profound knowledge of this instrument. Dr. Osinchuk presented a selection of Kosenko's piano music from the years 1919-1930. The four delightful "Children's Pieces" were reminiscent of Schumann's "Kinderscenen," which likewise are an evocation of a child's world. These Kosenko pieces have long been recognized as a standard by which similar music of other (Ukrainian) composers was measured.

The evening's piece de resistance, however, was the monumental cycle - "Eleven Études, Op. 8, " which was performed for the first time in North America. Kosenko was wont to say that he was "a composer in the minor mode," The majority of these études explore the minor scales with detectable traces of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. Just as this reviewer does not perceive Rachmaninoff's sound as being simply sad, but rather filled to overflowing with melancholic reverie, so also Kosenko's moods can be somber and dark (not unlike Rembrandt's canvases) as well as complex, as was the composer's life.

Kosenko wrote Op. 8 at the age of 26 in a burst of energy not unlike that needed to play the études. The cycle's electrifying content, where each measure is of significance, may be said to build architectonically into spectacular pillars of sound. Then again, the 12-note Brahmsian chords are toned to a delicate, evocative made, as in Étude No. 8 in F-Sharp Minor.

Like his fellow composer Vasyl Barvinskyi in western Ukraine, Kosenko was a master of chamber music. The second half of the program focused on music for violin and piano, most notably the Sonata in A Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 18. It was performed by Dr. Osinchuk together with the fine violinist Lee Wilkins, whose sensitive style proved idiomatic to the repertory. Each performer did not violate the sonic space of the other but kept a fine sense of ensemble in the joint projection of the sonata form as well as the other pieces.

The star of the evening, however, was Dr. Osinchuk, for it is to her that one owes, in the words of one critic, "the greatest discovery since Scriabin," - namely, Kosenko. Dr. Osinchuk's technique was extraordinarily clean; the complex scores were thought through and worked out in great detail. Besides technique and discipline, Dr. Osinchuk has that special skill to convey the soul of the music. Thus, in the performance, Kosenko sounded fresh and immediate; he came through as a refined cultural force transcending national boundaries.

Dr. Osinchuk's sustained dedication to and exuberance in promoting choice Ukrainian repertoire is well worth emulating. The announcement of the forthcoming Kosenko CD notwithstanding, one still hopes to see the publication of Dr. Osinchuk's doctoral thesis on Kosenko's piano music - the first dissertation on a Ukrainian composer written at Juilliard.