HOLY WEEK and Easter were kept with fervour in Ukraine. The
stand-off has stamped the whole country with a tension that you see
as you skirt potholes on city streets. In Kiev on Palm Sunday,
grateful Ukrainians flocked to soak up the liturgical music at the
brand-new, still unfinished, and only recently dedicated Ukrainian
Greek-Catholic Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of
Christ.
The event was special in three ways. One was the presence of
Patriarch Svyatoslav; the second was the equipping of children and
their elders alike with willow switches, used to denote palm
branches; and the third was the choir: the Bulava Chorus, founded
and conducted by Pavlo Hunka, an international opera singer, half
Ukrainian, and steeped from childhood in Slavonic liturgical chant.
This is the first Western ensemble to show solidarity by appearing
in Ukraine since its current troubles began.
They performed the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom by one
of the Ukraine's most important - here regrettably neglected -
composers, Kyrylo Stetsenko (1882-1922), who himself took holy
orders as a priest in the Orthodox Church, and served in a rural
parish before dying of typhus that he contracted while tending the
sick.
What stands out about this British-based chorus is the
scrupulously idiomatic way in which Hunka inspires its members to
sing. Many have a family background in what was once dubbed "Little
Russia" (Mala Rossiya); hence I was overwhelmed by the
articulacy of the Slavonic vowels and consonants, and the
confident, stylised delivery (from an upper gallery), which gave
extra immediacy to the striking drama of the proceedings below.
The beautifully phrased solos that emerged from the choral
textures, the rise and fall of the alleluias in Stetsenko's
relatively "safe", largely tonal but elegant
turn-of-the-last-century treatment, were all part of a rich
experience. Confidence and projection, plus that crucial quality of
support to the voices - that was all there. The fuller-bodied
sections lifted the spirits; reinforced by the schoolmasterish
tones of a booming bass cantor, many of those present were patently
moved.
An offshoot of Pavlo Hunka's activities, when he has time - as a
bass-baritone soloist, he is sought after by Daniel Barenboim,
Simon Rattle, and others - is promoting on record and in recital
the cause of Ukrainian art-song, which equates with German
Lieder, or in Russia to the songs (pisni) of
Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.In Ukraine, song has its own poignant
history. It was banned. Tsars and early Soviets forbade it to be
sung, unless in Russian or (the aristocratic and courtly language)
French.
Especially impressive in this rendering of Stetsenko's
Liturgyhad been the passionate, audibly beneficial
participation, intoning unfamiliar Ukrainian, of eight students
from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. It was
these uniformly gifted young singers who now performed a signal
service - of performing "lost" Ukrainian art-song in its
homeland.
The textual subjects covered, especially by the father of
Ukrainian song, Mykola Lysenko, are wide-ranging: from poignant
folk tales or love ditties ("The Sweetest Eyes") to heart-searching
("The Burdened Soul", "A Mother's Sorrow"), an almost fanatical
love of homeland, plus wan pleas to a benign (it is hoped) God
("Testament"), or a mixed religious and ritualistic, joyous or
gloomy sense of the passing of harvest, hours, and seasons.
The quality of the singing here was remarkable for aspiring
vocalists at the outset of their careers, tussling with an elusive
Slav tongue, mastering "shch", "ts", or the
impossible interjected glottal (written "b" and
"bi"). These songs had a cachet: each was a setting of
poetry by Ukraine's 200-year-old national poet, whom Kievians adore
almost idolatrously - the nation's Shakespeare and Goethe, and at
heart its Pushkin and Chekhov, too - Taras Shevchenko
(1814-61).
This is verse with fire in its belly and smoke from peasant
hearths in its breast. What uplifted one most? Tenor Seumas Begg's
happy-go-lucky singing of the joys of "The Cherry Orchard"; a
melting lullaby from the spirited and beautiful-toned soprano
Juliet Montgomery; and perhaps a lovely image-filled song about a
ribbon from another soprano, Kim Raw.
Aidan Edwards's "The wind howls" evoked the very soul of
Lysenko's writing. But the bass Eugene Dylan-Hooper had the plum,
Shevchenko's "Testament": "I will leave fields and rivers, and
ascend to the Throne where God sits alone. I'll clasp his feet and
beseech him. . . But till then, bury me, then. . . O rise up and
break your chains; then maybe one day, softly, you will speak of me
again."
The Lord may yield Ukrainians salvation, but men must meanwhile
stand up for themselves and defend a beleaguered homeland. It was
all very contemporary.
Setting the seal on the whole day's events was the Bulava
chorus's exquisite and - in the bodyof the building - resonant
singing of Borysiuk's homesick "My Thoughts" and Lysenko's
thunderous "The Dnieper Rages". National songs stimulated a moving
patriotic response: the entire cavernous cathedral erupted; members
of the audience sang along, and some of them wept.
Details of the Bulava Chorus and The Ukrainian Art Song
Recording Project can be found at www.uasp.ca.