OBITUARY: Washington-based champion of Ukrainian music, Joseph McLellan, 76 (01/08/06)

OBITUARY: Washington-based champion of Ukrainian music, Joseph McLellan, 76

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - "To the best of my recollection, I had never heard a note composed by Myroslav Skoryk until Wednesday night ...." With this straightforward admission, The Washington Post's music critic Joseph McLellan began his review of violinist Solomia Soroka's concert in Washington in February 2000, and added that "he should be better known in this country."

As in this instance, Mr. McLellan's reviews of other Ukrainian artists performing in the nation's capital over the past two decades oftentimes highlighted the "discovery" aspect of the experience.

Mr. McLellan died here on the day after Christmas. And with his passing Ukrainian classical music lost its great champion in the nation's capital.

On hearing about his death, Laryssa Courtney, who was the director of The Washington Group Cultural Fund for 10 of those years, observed that he approached music "with an open mind and keen ear."

"He relished hearing unfamiliar music performed by unfamiliar artists and wondered out loud why he hadn't heard it before. He was a very thoughtful and kind man, providing valuable background information where necessary, and highlighting the most positive aspects of a performance, where most of his colleagues made it a mission to point out any real or imagined shortcomings," Ms. Courtney said.

Mr. McLellan related his music experiences so eloquently, she added, that reading his column "was the next best thing to being there." In his 1983 review of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide anniversary concert at the Kennedy Center, Mr. McLellan included historical background information about the Holodomor and about Mykola Lysenko's opera "Taras Bulba" as describing an earlier Ukrainian struggle with Russian domination.

Less than two weeks after the Soroka concert in 2000, Mr. McLellan's review of another TWG Cultural Fund concert in a tribute to Taras Shevchenko, featuring bandurists Alla Kutsevych and Ludmyla Hrabovska, focused on the Ukrainian bard's role in the development of Ukraine's cultural and political history.

"Shevchenko, an early and outspoken critic of despotism in the czarist empire, was arrested and ended his life in exile," Mr. McLellan wrote. "His words attracted music, ranging from simple folk melodies to cantatas and operas, not only by relatively unfamiliar Ukrainian composers such as H. Hladkyi, M. Lysenko and Y. Stepovyi but by such well-known Russians as Modest Mussorgsky and Sergei Prokofiev."

One year later, Mr. McLellan found three more Ukrainian composers deserving of more attention in the United States: Mykola Kolessa, whose "Autumnal" and "Hutsulian" preludes were premiered in Washington by pianist Mykola Suk at the National Gallery of Art; and Stanislav Liudkevych and Vasyl Barvinsky (as well as Skoryk) - "exemplars of a vital and ancient musical culture that has struggled for centuries to win recognition for its distinctive identity" - whose works were on the program of another Cultural Fund concert, featuring soprano Oksana Krovytska and pianist Volodymyr Vynnytsky.

As Ms. Courtney noted and The Washington Post's current lead critic Tim Page pointed out in his obituary, Mr. McLellan was not known for sharply negative reviews; his criticism reflected more his "gentle, inquisitive and compassionate" nature, as Mr. Page described it.

His Krovytska-Vynnytsky review was one example: "Not many performers in this country know the Ukrainian repertoire well enough to give such a performance, and the result was fascinating - a glimpse of musical riches hardly suspected by American audiences. The performances were both skilled and fervent, the music - Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian - carefully selected for quality and interest."

As Mr. Page indicated, Mr. McLellan was aware that he was sometimes viewed as a "cheerleader." Some could say that about his appraisal of Mr. Suk's encore performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11, which he wrote, "nearly set the keyboard on fire."

Born in Quincy, Mass., the oldest of 12 children, Joseph McLellan came to The Washington Post in 1972. Initially he wrote on various subjects, Mr. Page noted, including cinema, drama, philosophy and chess, as well as music. He became the lead music critic in 1982, a position he held until 1995. He was 76 when he died of kidney failure in Hyattsville, Md.

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