Oliynyk's Third Concerto for Bandura and Orchestra has world premiere (01/18/04)

Oliynyk's Third Concerto for Bandura and Orchestra has world premiere

by Adriana Shmahalo

SACRAMENTO - Oksana Herasymenko introduced Yuriy Oliynyk's Third Concerto for Bandura and Orchestra in a world premiere here in the capital of California on November 15, 2003.

This was the opening of the 41st season for the Camellia Symphony Orchestra. The auditorium was filled to overflowing, and the press reviews for the Bandura Concerto were sensational.

A few days before the concert, Patricia Beach Smith, the main music critic for the Sacramento Bee, had placed an article with a full-page color photograph of the soloist, bandura virtuoso Ms. Herasymenko, with an interview and her impressions from a demonstration concert at American River College. She noted that the Ukrainian national instrument shows a multitude of tonal colors and technical possibilities.

Ms. Smith was impressed by the beauty of the music and the exquisite workmanship of the instrument itself, which was custom-made by Ms. Herasymenko's father, Vasyl Herasymenko. Ms. Smith noted that Ms. Herasymenko is a bandura virtuoso, composer and singer whose voice resembles that of Edith Piaf. She wrote that the singer-bandurist has a master's degree and was taught by her father, Mr. Herasymenko, professor of bandura at the Lviv State Music Academy, which recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. She also pointed out that Lviv was founded in 1256.

Eugene Castillo, the conductor of the Camellia Symphony, said that the music of Mr. Oliynyk is loved by the public and that Ms. Herasymenko's playing "is a visual feast," which includes the smooth changing of tonalities with the hand-operated switches and the artistry of negotiating all 65 strings on the instrument.

Indeed, the virtuosic concerto No. 3, "Exotic," by Mr. Oliynyk was dedicated to Ms. Herasymenko. It features a tam-tam in the percussion section, which gives it a certain exotic character. The treatment of phrases, which merge one into another, makes this concerto markedly different from its predecessors. The introduction begins with a chant in parallel fifths resembling ancient choral music with periodic strokes of the tam-tam. A brisk bandura passage leads to the first march-like theme played by a combination of strings and woodwinds. A tense succession of key changes, so characteristic for this composer, lasts almost through the entire concerto.

The three-movement structure of the concerto follows a traditional sonata allegro form with clearly defined contrasts between the individual movements. The thematic arrangement presents colorful musical images with changing moods and suggestive twists. The second slow movement resembles Ukrainian folk motifs with an impressionistic accompaniment and a somewhat accelerated middle section.

The last movement is a toccata in fast tempo, which requires virtuoso technique on the bandura. The xylophone, which is absent in the other concertos, is used extensively. The sounds of the bandura and the xylophone create an exotic juxtaposition, which reinforce the exotic character of this concerto. A brief restatement of the theme from the first movement provides a link between the beginning and the end of the composition. There is an interesting brief quotation of a motive from Ms. Herasymenko's Elegy in the extensive bandura cadenza in the first movement. This reminds us to whom the concerto is dedicated.

Mr. Oliynyk is already known as the composer of three other concertos for bandura and orchestra, which were performed both in the United States and Ukraine, and were recorded on a CD by his wife, Ola Herasymenko, as a soloist with the Lviv Virtuosos Symphony Orchestra and Ukraine's Shevchenko State Award-Winning conductor Yurii Lutsiv.

Ms. Herasymenko's brief stay in California came to an end, but before she returned to Lviv, where she is professor of bandura at the Lviv State Music Academy, she gave concerts at the Ukrainian Saturday School with 350 children in attendance, Ukrainian Catholic churches in Sacramento and in San Francisco, as well as at Stanford University in Palo Alto as part of the commemoration of the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine in 1932-1933. She met the well-known author of "The Harvest of Sorrow," Dr. Robert Conquest.

She returned to Lviv hastily in order to continue her work in order to raise a new generation of students of Ukrainian musical culture and to further the bandura's full potential, which should be developed by contemporary Ukrainian composers and performers alike.

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