Grazhda concert series 2002: An overview of the 20th anniversary season (10/13/02)

Grazhda concert series 2002: An overview of the 20th anniversary season

by Kitty Montgomery

EAST JEWETT, N.Y. - Summer 2002 marked the 20th anniversary of the concert series presented at the Grazhda concert hall. Founded by Ukrainian composer and musicologist Dr. Ihor Sonevytsky to promote world-class classical music, past programs by emerging young talents and established members of the artistic elite have featured pianist Alexander Slobodyanik, bass baritone Paul Plishka, and violinists Oleh Krysa and Yuri Mazurkevich.

While Dr. Sonevytsky will continue to serve the series as honorary chairman of the board, Ika Koznarska Casanova next season assumes the position of executive director, with Mr. Vynnytsky, as music director.

Among six concerts offered during the 2002 Grazhda season, four were reviewed locally (by this reviewer) in the Kingston Daily Freeman, including the Zapolski String Quartet of Denmark, bass-baritone Taras Kulish, violinist Solomia Ivakhiv and the Forte String Quartet.

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The Zapolski String Quartet - Aleksander Zapolski, violin, Jacob Soelberg, violin, Gregori Khodos, viola, and Troels Svane, cello - appeared at the Music and Art Center of Greene County's Grazhda concert hall on June 29.

Founded in 1993, the quartet - referred to as "possibly the best string quartet in Denmark right now" (Politiken, DK, March 2001) - was appointed ensemble-in-residence at the Royal Library in Copenhagen (1999-2001), where it performed a series of exhibition concerts with an emphasis on the Danish quartet repertoire. The quartet received the Danish Music Critics' Association Award in 2000 and was nominated for a Danish Music Award for its recording of Carl Nielsen's string quartets.

The quartet's delivery of Nielsen's "Lille Suite for Strings," Op.1, was characterized in the concert review as "an epiphany," while play through the familiar Brahms, Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 51, "soared beyond structure to evoke a soundscape where sensuality and emotion mix in a volatile, ecstasy-inducing suspension." In contrast, the ferocity of the Zapolski's execution of Beethoven's Quartet in F Minor, "made their instruments seem dangerous as powder kegs with fuses lit, pressing to eminent detonation."

Mr. Vynnytsky joined the ensemble in Fauré's Piano Quintet in C Minor, a work which, "commencing as a voluptuously lush and beauteous tapestry, evolved, with subltelty, to a powerful cri de coeur."

The Zapolski concert program was repeated at the Music Mountain series in Connecticut on June 30 and broadcast from that venue on National Public Radio.

Montreal-born bass-baritone Taras Kulish, who is quickly making a name for himself at opera houses and orchestras across North America and who made his European debut in the title role of "Don Giovanni" in France and Belgium this summer, appeared in a lieder recital for the Music at Grazhda series on August 3.

The concert review noted that: Mr. Kulish's voice "serves his sensibility as a genuine poet with the empathetic capacity to experience depths of a text and draw his listeners into its profoundly realized sentiment via the evocative incidental beaauty of his voice." Mr. Kulish performed three Schubert lieder, Jaques Ibert's "Songs of Don Quixote" and Ihor Sonevytsky's song cycle "Withered Leaves" set to lyrics by Ivan Franko. He flashed the count's charm and bite in "Non Pui Andrei" from "Nozze di Figaro," concluding with a trio of Ukrainian songs and "Old Man River" from "Showboat" as an encore.

Young violinist Solomia Ivakhiv, who holds a master's degree from the Lviv Conservatory and has performed in international competitions and at music festivals in Poland (Wieniaswski), Switzerland (Verbier) and America's Tanglewood - made her debut recital for the Music at Grazhda series on August 24. Ms. Ivakhiv studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Joseph Silverstein.

As noted in the recital review, Ms. Ivakhiv's performance "has distinctive charm and subtle profundity ...; she uses her bow as a divining rod, open to and emanating the nuances of the veritable 'spring' in Beethoven's Sonata in F Major and the sensual impulse in Brahms' Sonata in A Major as they come to her. ... Technique serves her intuitive Alice-in-the-wonderland-of-music approach with phrases expanding from within. She neither drives nor chases a score. She illuminates it."

Ms. Ivakhiv's fleet execution of Eugene Ysaye's solo Sonata No. 4 ("In the manner of Kreisler") was followed, in unison with Mr. Vynnytsky, by the rhytmically primal execution of Skoryk's "Allegretto and Dance." The recital concluded with the duo's collaboration in Pablo Sarasate's "Zigeunerweisen," Op. 20," - an ephemeral send-up of earthy sensuality transmuted to dream, with Ms. Ivakhiv's play, innocent and knowing, releasing a sheer joie de vivre, seductive, enchanting and pure," according to the review.

The Grazhda series' gala anniversary concert - "From Vienna to Broadway" - an evening of operettas and American musicals held on July 20, showcased the vocal splendor of soprano Aleksandra Hrabova, mezzo-soprano Charlene Marcinko and baritone Greg Kail.

On August 17, pianist Oksana Lutsyshyn offered works by Scriabin - "Sonata Fantasy," Op. 19 and "Two Poems," Op. 32; A. Kasparov - the sonata "In Tre Canti Ostinati" and Tocatta; V. Kikta's Sonata No. 3, Op. 30, and Schumann's "Kinderszenen," Op. 15.

Born in Ukraine, Ms. Lutsyshyn received her doctoral degree from the Moscow Conservatory in 1991. In the United States as a visiting scholar at the Indiana University School of Music, she has appeared as soloist and in chamber music concerts throughout the former Soviet Union, Germany, the United States and South Africa.

A regular at festivals on the Eastern Seaboard, Ms. Lutsyshyn is currently a member of CREO, a contemporary music ensemble in residence at Old Dominion University. She has won top prizes at the Vienna Modern Masters Third International Performers' Record-ing Awards Competition, and the William Kapell International Competi-tion in College Park, Md. Ms. Lutsyshyn has recorded for the Vienna Modern Master and Contemporary Record Society labels.

The concluding concert of the Grazhda series featured The Forte String Quartet - Michael Kuchuk, violin, Oleksandr Abayev, violin, Kalin Ivanov, cello, and Roumi Petrova, viola - joined by Yuri Kharenko, solo violin, and pianist Mr. Vynnytsky, in a Sunday matinee performance on September 1.

The concert was presented as part of The Mountaintop Piano and Strings Festival played on Labor Day weekend at the venues of three Greene County organizations offering live classical music recitals - The Catskill Mountain Foundation, the Music and Art Center of Greene County and the Windham Chamber Music Festival.

The Forte ensemble, whose artistically distinct violinists Messrs. Kuchuk and Abayev alternate first chair, toured Europe for a decade before accepting the role of quartet-in-residence for the Manhattan Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra.

The Forte presented a program of works by Beethoven (Quartet No. 4.), Petrova ("Poem for Violin and String Quartet"; Skoryk (Partita No. 6 for String Quartet and Sonevytsky (Piano Quintet in C Major).

Ms. Petrova's "Poem for Violin and String Quartet," a piece inspired by Mr. Kharenko, was described in the concert review as "sheer music without the arrest of conscious construct. Mr. Kharenko's sweep of its lines induced tears of passion beyond sentiment. The quartet sent this soaring gypsy fiddler to flight with vibrant committment ... a quality they brought to subsequent performances of Skoryk and Sonevytsky."

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