Three Ukrainian composers who have never been played in the Berlin Philharmonic, an audience well fed with people from the Ukraine, and one that is hardly known in this country Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra. With his invitation to a unique concert, the Musikfest Berlin creates an art and cultural-political sensation, with the Ukraine Ambassador Andrej Melnyk sitting next to the German Minister of State for Culture, Claudia Roth. You can feel joy, sadness, tremors and liveliness in the hall. When the chief conductor of the orchestra, Hobart Earle, makes his announcement in German and repeats the message in Ukrainian, an enthusiasm erupts that has rarely been heard here.
Familiar with the famous orchestras from Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Cleveland, and their perfect splendor at this music festival, one now also wanted to know: Can the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1937, score artistically in the international music scene? The clear yes has two reasons. On the one hand, the ensemble from the cultural city of Odessa is musically capable of an all-round convincing, even brilliant performance. On the other hand, what does that have to do with his committed ability Chief Conductor Hobart Earle has to do.
Born in Venezuela in 1960 to American parents and trained in Vienna, London and Princeton, the conductor Hobart Earle got to know and love the city of Odessa and its Philharmonic back in the 1990s. For years he has been a guest conductor of international orchestras from Cologne to Saint Petersburg to New York and Taipei, leading the Odessa Philharmonic. Has developed musical homogeneity and flexible joy of playing with them. And let yourself be drawn in by the tonal language of Ukrainian composers. Three Ukrainian composers who have never been performed in Germany are on the program before the break: two charming orchestral miniatures and a heavyweight piano concerto.
Myroslav Skoryk (1938-2020), also a pianist and musicologist from Lviv, who studied in Moscow with Dmitri Kabalevsky, composed a piece entitled “Dytynstvo” (Childhood). Hobart Earle, according to his announcement, dedicates the cheerfully pointed play to all children in Ukraine today.
One event is the celebrated pianist Tamara Stefanovich
Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), Tchaikovsky’s peer and patron, invented a lithely beautiful “elegy” which the conductor attacca followed up on Skoryk’s children’s play. Lysenko, educated at the Leipzig Conservatory, later a student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg, musician and natural scientist, composed the opera “Taras Bulba”. Hobart Earle conducted her powerfully charged overture as the second encore at the end of the concert. Lysenko is the father of Ukrainian music, he is also the namesake of the Conservatory in Lviv, the Opera Theater in Kharkov and the columned hall in the National Philharmonic in Kyiv.
The very unique piano concerto by Alemdar Karamanov (1934-2007), who was born in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula and trained at the Moscow Conservatory, plays in a completely different musical world disgrace fell. For the rest of his life he returned to Simferopol. Shostakovich called him “an interesting and distinct talent . . .” Karamanov composed 24 sacral symphonies, approaching Christian mythology. And the gnarly originality of his third piano concerto from 1968, called “Ave Maria”, performed here is enough to illustrate the intellectual obstinacy of this composer.
The event in Karamanov’s Piano Concerto is the internationally acclaimed pianist Tamara Stefanovich, which helped the interplay of spirituality and virtuosity with pianistic control and emotional tension to flourish. Stefanovich only studied the score for this single performance in Berlin; she had the patience of an angel to meditate on the keys for the stretch test of the infinitely long and slow movement of floating wave sequences. It was reminiscent of religious litanies. And together with the Odessa Philharmonic, who ended up mastering Jean Sibelius’ second symphony, she found ways to replace concert dialogue with the art of long breathing.