Turning the pages back... May 13, 1912 (05/09/99)

Turning the pages back...

May 13, 1912

Vadym Kipa was a musician who rode on the waves of history. He was born on May 13, 1912, in Kuchmisterska Slobodka, a suburb of Kyiv, and travelled to study piano under private tutors in Kharkiv and then at the Kharkiv Conservatory.

In the 1930s, as Stalin's hammer was obliterating much of Ukraine's intellectual and artistic élite, Kipa thrived. In 1935 he transferred to the Kyiv Conservatory, just in time to be taught by the renowned folklorist and pedagogue Hryhorii Beklemishev (who died later that year). Kipa graduated from the conservatory in 1937 with a piano virtuoso's diploma and joined its conservatory's teaching staff.

Also that year, Kipa took part in the first All-Soviet Piano Competition in Moscow and was one of 10 finalists. He was designated a "Laureate of the Soviet Union" and his certificate was signed by (among others) Serge Prokofiev. This launched his career as a concert pianist, enabling him to perform solo and with symphonic orchestras. His repertoire included works by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.

The pianist managed to complete his graduate studies in 1941, just before Hitler's armies struck at the USSR. Two years later the Nazis deported him to Berlin. However, his musical mastery smoothed his path - he was appointed accompanist of the Klindworth-Schwarenka Conservatory's opera studio, and then assistant professor at the conservatory (Franz Liszt's alma mater), and even garnered plaudits from the music critic at the Berliner Zeitung.

After the war Kipa remained as a displaced person in the British zone of Germany, then in 1951 he immigrated to the U.S. A year later he established his own piano school and studio in New York City, where he applied his own original methods of teaching. Over the years he composed a Ukrainian classical musician's teaching aid, titled "Children's Corner: Album for Youth," which consisted of 14 pieces based in part on folk melodies.

Kipa composed music for piano, voice and piano, and violin and piano, influenced by the currents of Impressionism, Neoromanticism and Neoclassicism. After producing his first work, "Lament," in 1939, he underwent a fallow period that ended with the productive years following his arrival in New York. His works include "Reminiscence" (1953), "Variations Phantastiques" (1957), "Gavotte Interrupted by a Serenade" (1958) and "Gallop in Mi-Minor" (1959).

In the 1960s, Kipa concentrated on producing musical settings for Ukrainian poetry, such as the piano-voice works set to poems by Vadym Lesych (1960-1963), an "art music" cycle based on Lesia Ukrainka's verse (1966-1967), and a piece set to Andrij Malyshko's poem "Pisnia pro Kyiv" (A Song about Kyiv, 1968). Kipa also wrote arrangements to Mozart's Divertimento in D and the "Chaconne" by Brahms.

Vadym Kipa died in New York City on August 31, 1968.

"Kipa, Vadym," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988); "Wadym Kippa," Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2 (1972).

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