YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Concert pianist Roman Rudnytsky was on a concert tour from mid-February through April that began on several Pacific islands.
The tour began in mid-February in the Marshall Islands with a recital on the island of Majuro, which is where the capital of this island nation is. In addition to the recital, presented by the local music society, he also played short recitals at two local schools.
Following this, Mr. Rudnytsky traveled to the island of Kwajalein, where he stayed several days, played for music students at the local high school and presented a full recital. Kwajalein is run by the U.S. Army and has missile-tracking stations there; anyone who goes there must have permission from the Army and be on some official business. This was Mr. Rudnytsky’s fourth time there.
The Kwajalein Atoll is the largest in the world and Mr. Rudnytsky also traveled to the island of Roi-Namur (on another side of the atoll) for a recital there. Both islands were controlled by the Japanese in the earlier years of World War II and were the scenes of heavy fighting until liberated in 1944 by U.S. forces.
After the Marshall Islands, Mr. Rudnytsky traveled to Guam, where for the third year in a row he was invited to be the featured soloist in the Tumon Bay Music Festival, which ran for eight days in early March. He did some adjudicating where local piano students were vying for gold, silver and bronze ratings.
The center point of his activities was being soloist in the festival’s closing concert on March 12, when, as soloist with the international wind orchestra of the festival, he performed that unique “half-classical, half-pop” piece the “Warsaw Concerto” by composer Richard Addisell. Deliberately written in Rachmaninoff’s style, this was originally the film score for the 1941 British movie “Dangerous Moonlight” and later achieved a lot of popularity due to its association with famed pop pianist Liberace, who played it often.
Mr. Rudnytsky then spent 10 days on the island of Saipan in the Northern Marianas, where he gave two full recitals (with different programs) as well as shorter programs for students at the three high schools on the island and several other public and private schools there. This was at least the seventh time Mr. Rudnytsky has performed on Saipan since his first visit in the early 1990s.
In 2004, he was invited to come to perform several works by American composers as part of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Saipan that year, which had a lot of U.S. Marines veterans return for the commemoration and where he heard the address of the keynote speaker, Col. Paul Tibbett, who had been the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima.
Mr. Rudnytsky also traveled to New Zealand where, during the month of April, he fulfilled his 15th concert tour there – playing eight recitals. All except the last one were on the North Island. Specifically, these recitals took place at the Pump House Theater in the Auckland suburb of Takapuna, at the Whittaker’s Music Museum on Waiheke Island (outer Auckland harbor area), in the city of Tauranga, in the towns of Whakatane, Taupo, Taumurunui, at the Hawkins Theater in Papakura and in Reefton (South Island).
The recital Mr. Rudnytsky played at Whittaker’s Music Museum was in what is the premier piano museum in New Zealand – containing a variety of rare antique pianos. Mr. Rudnytsky played his recital on an 1897 Bechstein concert grand, which had been brought out by the famed Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski for his 1904 Australian and New Zealand tour. Following his recital in Auckland (which concluded the tour), Paderewski opted not to take this piano back to Europe and sold it in Auckland. The museum acquired this instrument in 2001 from the grandson of the original owner and it is now used for the museum’s concert series.
Mr. Rudnytsky has been re-invited to come back to those Pacific islands and New Zealand for 2017. Meanwhile, in August, September and October, he will play recitals on five cruises of P&O and Cunard ships to and from England. These cruises, on P&O’s Arcadia and Oriana plus on Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth, will go to the Baltic region, the Norwegian fjords and the Bay of Biscay, and will also include a westward trans-Atlantic crossing.
In between, Mr. Rudnytsky will play seven recitals in England – at the cathedrals of Peterborough, Sheffield, Ely, Winchester and Portsmouth, as well as a recital again at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in London through the invitation of Bishop Hlib Lonchyna. He last played a recital there in January 2015.