BERKELEY, Calif. – On December 9, 2015, in Hertz Hall on the University of California, Berkeley campus, Marika Kuzma led two concerts that marked her retirement from the university choirs. It was one of many culminating events in the 25 years of her teaching there.
The year 2015 was marked by several milestones in her career as a choral director and Slavic music scholar. Her edition of the Bortniansky Choral Concertos will soon be published by the international publisher Carus Verlag in Germany. Her compact disc of Dmytro Bortniansky’s music on the prestigious Naxos label won rave reviews and an extensive interview in Fanfare Magazine.
On the concert stage: in early April 2015, she performed the Bach ”Mass in B minor” with her Chamber Chorus to sold-out audiences; in late April, she prepared her choirs for performances of Mozart’s ”Requiem” and John Adams’ ”Death of Klinghoffer.” Her choruses performed with the Berkeley Symphony under Joana Carneiro with the famous composer Mr. Adams himself attending rehearsals and the concert. In September, she prepared her singers for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Gustavo Dudamel and an international live-streaming broadcast. In November, she conducted West Coast premieres of music by her former assistant Trevor Weston and Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang Symphony-Cantata” with full orchestra. For her final concerts, she presented a program of all-Ukrainian carols representing diverse traditions, musical styles and regions.
As Ms. Kuzma herself wrote of the December concert in her program notes:
“When I was growing up in a Ukrainian American community in New England, my mother would tell tales of the Christmas season in Ukraine. While she cooked borshch and pyrohy in our kitchen, she would recite poetry about carolers in the Carpathian Mountains, and her eyes would become misty. The poems told of magical carolers and musicians who would weave through snowdrifts going door to door, their carols ringing through the valleys. She also recounted stories of celebrations in her home city of Lviv in western Ukraine. On the eve of ‘Sviato Yordana’ (Epiphany), she would sit with her father, Volodymyr Haftkowycz, in his office overlooking the city’s main market square. They would look out and listen to church bells pealing and watch all of the region’s choirs gather to thunder out songs well past midnight.
“These concerts recreate the magic of that culture and that moment. After a time when Ukraine’s town squares were marked by dramatic protest and violence, during a time of strife in the ‘border’ regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, these concerts affirm and celebrate a people united in song and good will.”
The concerts included music for concert choir and music of the folk tradition. The UC choirs sang liturgical pieces by Bortniansky and Alexander Koshetz; arrangements of folk carols by the composer-ethnographers Vasyl Barvinsky, Mykola Leontovych, Mykola Lysenko and Yakiv Yatsynevich; a lullaby carol composed in the displaced persons camp in Mittenwald, Germany, by the Rev. Bohdan Hanushevsky; and newly composed “Shchedrivky” by contemporary composers currently living in Ukraine.
The concerts also included very special guest artists: True Life Trio (a Berkeley-based women’s ensemble), world-renowned bandurist Julian Kytasty, Koliadnyky from the village of Kryvorivnia and Verkhovyna in the Carpathian Mountains, and the photographer-videographer Volodymyr Klyuzko. The Koliadnyky were joined by New York City’s Yara Arts Group under the direction of Virlana Tkacz in what was the first excursion for both to the West Coast.
A celebrated theater director, Ms. Tkacz, who spent a winter researching Koliada rituals in the Carpathian Mountains in the 2000s, has flown in and featured a group of Koliadnyky in various productions with the Yara Arts Group at La Mama Theater in New York City, Toronto and other locations on the East Coast over the last decade.
After the concerts in Berkeley, the Koliadnyky also performed at St. Dominic Church in San Francisco with Ms. Kuzma’s Chamber Chorus and in Mountain View and Sacramento (events sponsored by Nova Ukraina).
The Berkeley concerts ended with Ms. Kuzma’s Chamber Chorus singing an excerpt from Lesia Dychko’s “Zyma” (Winter): “Let our song resound: a song of peace, joy, and good fortune.” The final chords, with both choirs surrounding the full house, rang out “Z novym rokom vas!” (a New Year greeting), followed by the sound of the trembity from the organ loft.
The Rizdvo (Christmas) concerts in Berkeley were enthusiastically received by audiences totaling over 1,000 people – the vast majority non-Ukrainians. They were met with immediate standing ovations by the campus community who came both to hear the rich, unusual program and to bid farewell to Ms. Kuzma as the director of choirs at “Cal.”
As an encore, Ms. Kuzma sang to the audience and her students: at the noon concert, the folksong to the Carpathians “Hey, Hey”; at the evening concert, the American Spiritual “All Night All Day.”
Ms. Kuzma says she has no immediate plans after her official retirement in July. She hopes to continue in music or research or stage work in the next chapter of her career.
The concerts were particularly poignant and bittersweet for Ms. Kuzma in many ways. “The inspiration for this concert came from my mother’s memoirs. As it happens, Oksana Kuzma passed away just over a month ago: the woman whose voice I heard singing Bortniansky in church and who sang ‘Spy, Isuse’ [Sleep, Jesus] to me when I was a child. I feel blessed for her memoirs and her memory and fortunate to share this music with my students at UC Berkeley and the Bay Area community,” she commented.