Kyiv Chamber Choir performs at White House (12/28/97)

Kyiv Chamber Choir performs at White House

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - The Kyiv Chamber Choir, on its debut tour of the United States, brought the best of Ukrainian ecclesiastical and Christmas music to the nation's capital last weekend.

The choir sang Ukrainian carols at the White House, baroque and contemporary religious music masterpieces at the National Cathedral, and a program combining both before a large audience at the George Mason University Center for the Arts.

Washington was the second of four cities on the choir's East Coast tour, which began December 18 at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Philadelphia and included concerts also in New York City's Carnegie Hall and at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, N.H.

"The group has only 20 singers, but what singers they are - big, marvelously focused voices, the kind that might easily hold their own on the opera stage but without the kind of operatic vibrato that can make an ensemble rattle," wrote Washington Post reviewer Joan Reinthaler following their December 20 performance at the George Mason Arts Center. "They can sing wonderfully clean unisons and the basses have low E's to die for," she added. "These are, of course, the sort of voices that the music on their all-Ukrainian program was written for."

The ecclesiastical part of the concert program included works by such noted composers as Artem Vedel, Mykola Diletsky, Kyrylo Stetsenko, Mykola Leontovych and Mykola Lysenko, as well as by two contemporary composers, Lesia Dychko and Victor Stepurko.

The second half of the program, devoted to Ukrainian Christmas music, highlighted even more contemporary works. In addition to carols by Ms. Dychko and Mr. Stepurko, the choir sang carols by Yuriy Alzhnev, Anatolii Avdiievsky, Yevhen Stankovych and Alexander Yakivchuk.

Most of the program was sung a cappella, but some works included accompaniment by sopilka, pan flute, alto sax and jingle bells, and parts were choreographed and animated.

The Washington Post reviewer singled out two memorable pieces from what she perceived to be an otherwise uninteresting program: "the lovely, anonymous 16th-century monody sung beautifully (to the accompaniment of a single pedal point hummed by the men) by conductor Mykola Hobdych and the announcement of the good news of Christ's birth, played on a set of plaintive panpipes and recited (in Russian [actually, Church Slavonic - ed.]) by one of the singers with a stunning bass voice. The rest was full of gorgeous sounds, but not of very interesting music."

The audience, however, which filled almost all of the 1,800 seats of the George Mason Arts Center, apparently found the program interesting enough for a standing ovation and calls for encores.

While the Saturday evening concert was the reason for the Kyiv Chamber Choir's visit to the capital area, the most memorable event for the choristers was their performance earlier that afternoon at the White House, where they were invited to sing Ukrainian carols during the annual VIP viewing of the Christmas-decorated White House. Their appearance coincided with the tour of the president's residence by Washington's diplomatic corps, including some representatives from the Ukrainian Embassy. They were also greeted by the first lady's chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, who is of Ukrainian descent.

Another memorable moment came the following morning, when the visiting choir stood in front of the main altar of the National Cathedral and sang a half-hour choral prelude to the cathedral's Sunday religious service, filling the huge gothic structure with the religious works of Bortniansky, Berezovsky, Stetsenko, Lysenko, Leontovych and Stepurko.

The choir members' Washington visit began with a Friday evening reception at the Ukrainian Embassy, yet another occasion to show their artistry as well as to help the other guests in a sing-along of Ukrainian Christmas carols.

The reception was sponsored by The Washington Group Cultural Fund, one of many organizations and institutions that assisted in bringing the ensemble to the U.S. under the lead sponsorship of American Friends for Ukraine Inc. The supporting groups also included the Ukrainian National Association, the Ukrainian Institute of America, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Air Ukraine, the Kyiv City Department of Culture, and Ukraine's Embassy, Mission to the United Nations and Consulate General in New York.

Founded in 1990, the Kyiv Chamber Choir set as its goal the restoration of ancient Ukrainian liturgical music. It has performed extensively in Europe, winning at a number of prestigious choral festivals.

The choir has a half a dozen recordings that cover the centuries of Ukrainian liturgical music composition.

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