Grazhda summer concert series - 2001: an overview (10/07/01)

Grazhda summer concert series - 2001: an overview

by Kitty Montgomery

In this suspended time, following the attack on the World Trade Center, when man hangs on the edge of an abyss of dread at the prospect of a cycle of military retaliation that may unloose a Pandora's box of sinister weaponry, material edifices seem vulnerable and transient.

What skyscraper, what library or museum can stand against ravages of war in the 21st century? The sole enduring archive for human life is the human spirit, whose conservators and celebrants are our poets and performing artists. With each communal sharing, they pass on legacies of sorrow and joy, and illuminate the potential transcendence of our species.

Jungians refer to this enduring legacy as "the collective unconscious." Differently tempered by every race and nation's history, this psychic reservoir is our collective soul, which music may serve as the purest kinetic conduit.

No musician first picks up an instrument or sings with the conscious intent of tapping through to universals. The gift is innate, the quest instinctual, recognized and nurtured by those great teachers, themselves possessed of the Promethean capacity to pass light between worlds. We call the children who bear the gift "prodigy" and honor those musicians who transcend the vanity of aesthetic exhibition and the indulgence of personal catharsis with the title "artist."

Among a multitude of ambitious career contenders, their appearance is rare. Rarer still was a convocati of such musical titans - Ukrainians all - performing at the Grazhda concert hall in Jewett Center, N.Y., this past summer to celebrate the 19th season of a two-month festival series founded by composer Ihor Sonevytsky.

Before the thaw known as glasnost and before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Maestro Sonevytsky featured outstanding musicians of Ukraine and Americans of Ukrainian descent at this intimate hall, hand-crafted for ethnic authenticity and acoustic resonance by master builders of the local Ukrainian community, who were drawn to this plateau in Greene County by its resemblance to regions of the Carpathian Mountains.

Some, like the Grazhda's pianist and composer-in-residence, Volodymyr Vynnytsky, a former winner of the Long-Thibaud International Piano Competition in Paris, made his American debut at the Grazhda before going on to perform in the country's great halls and festivals. Others, like pianist Alexander Slobodyanik and violinist Oleh Krysa, played Sonevytsky's festival series after the Soviet ban on travel was lifted, and they were allowed to resume stellar careers, previously established in the United States.

Mr. Slobodyanik's concert at Grazhda, witnessed 12 summers ago, came as an electrifying cultural shock, in context with aesthetic-oriented performances offered in many American chamber music forums. We survived the experience as an illuminating psychic seizure, and have returned to the hall every subsequent season to suffer, in degree, the ecstatic, heart-stopping, hackle-raising experience of that first exposure to the phenomenon of the "Ukrainian soul." Whether these artists who play Sonevytsky's festival have studied at the great conservatories of Moscow or Kyiv, or in America's music schools, for each of them the music begins when the infinite sings in.

If Dante's hell has its circles, so probably does the "Ungrund" of the collective soul have its corners and facets, uniquely struck and illuminated by individual artists. This season Yuri Mazurkevich and Mr. Krysa, both longtime protégés of David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory, who qualify equally for the accolade - "greatest violinist of his generation" - performed separately and at the beginning and conclusion of the Grazhda season.

Mr. Mazurkevich, who recently returned to a solo career after leading the Leontovych String Quartet, played Paganini, Brahms, Sarasate, Vitali-Charlier and Sonevytsky, partnered by Mr. Vynnytsky. Even in the most virtuosic, demanding reaches, easily encompased, of this repertoire, the song Mr. Mazurkevich's strings sing, remains profoundly human, translating note to conversant emotion, rendering the infinite, intimate.

In contrast, Mr. Krysa, who recently assumed first chair in the Leontovych, is possessed of a laser-flash brilliance he deploys to strike and light seemingly impossible reaches of contemporary repertoire. In concert with the Leontovych for the last performance of the series, co-sponsored by the Catskill Mountain Foundation, the kinetic energy of his kozak's cut, moderated to fuse with the quartet's current ensemble, including violinist Peter Krysa, violist Borys Deviatov, and cellist Volodymyr Panteleyev, served to vaporize lines of Valentin Silvestrov's String Quartet (1974) to a hallucinogenic disturbance, conveying cries and whispers out of time. In a house of Sunday afternoon patrons making their first pilgrimage to the Grazhda, their performance engendered breathless awe.

Another pair of string players, cellist Natalia Khoma, a top prize winner at the Tchaikovsky and Belgrade international competitions, and Yuri Kharenko, longtime violinist with the Leontovych, who now pursues a solo career, joined Mr. Vynnytsky for a "Jewett Jubilee" gala, featuring solo performances and three Latin American trios, composed for the occasion by Mr. Vynnytsky.

Elena Heimur, winner of the Puccini Foundation-Licia Albanese International Competition Award and the Tchaikovsky International Competition, toasted the event with a champagne-festive selection of songs from popular operettas, tossed off with infectious exuberance in a lustrous soprano. Marianna Vynnytsky was an affecting interpreter of her husband's bleakly beautiful composition, "Healing Herb," set to the poem "Podorozhnyk" by Ivan Malkovych. Against an instrumental trio fusing Ukrainian folk modes and Latin rhythms, the singing protagonist is a cast-off, roadside waif, offering tormented flesh and soul to taunting passers-by.

Mr. Kharenko, who is presently in Ukraine to premiere composer Myroslav Skoryk's new violin concerto, is a native of Kyiv who studied with Abram Stern, one of an extraordinary dynasty of violinists to emerge from the famous Stoliarsky School in Odesa preceding the Russian Revolution, including Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein and the great Oistrakh.

After two decades of discipline in a quartet structure, what Mr. Kharenko loosed at Grazhda, abetted by Mr. Vynnytsky at the keyboard, in a Brahms scherzo, a caprice by Kreisler and Vieuxtemps' brilliant satire "Souvenir d'Amérique" (Yankee Doodle), were free soaring lines of myriad timbres and emotive facets. With intonation honed to immaculate, in parings with the Leontovych's former lead violinists, Semen Kobets and Mr. Mazurkevich, what stands out in Mr. Kharenko's play is the ecstatic. Tinged with a subliminal soul cry, the spontaneity of his executions reflects his genuine gypsy heritage, unquenchable, in classic servitude.

Performing two Hungarian dances by Brahms and compositions by Granados and Cassadó, Ms. Khoma's volatile play induced joy and beauteous grief. Her bowmanship is effortless, her pedal tones subsume the heart.

The instrumental trio collaboration in Vynnytsky's "Lost Tango and "Summer's Samba," sent up with the passion of a tango band and the finesse of infinite classic technique, evoked the dreams and lost hopes that haunt this dance of émigrés in exile, its sensuality and poignancy.

Singers Stefan Szkafarowsky and Stefania Dovhan shared separate evenings with Grazhda audiences. Basso Szkafarowsky performed with his accompanist Oksana Protenic, and soprano Dovhan was partnered by Mr. Vynnytsky.

Writing in the Hudson Valley's Daily Freeman this critic ascribed the source of American-born Mr. Szkafarowsky's gift to the vocal tradition of the Don Cossacks [Kozaks] "who sang riding into battle, side-slipped on their horses, to avoid the Tatar's arrows," continuing..." the point being that his voice is immutable. He could sing standing on his head, and still, his awesome tones would flow, unchanging, in resonant, enveloping waves. Topping a depth of tone with the easy reach of a basso-profundo, Mr. Szkafarowsky has a spectacular brilliance in his upper register, with sustained tones all three of the famous "Three Tenors" would envy.

Shortly after his Grazhda performance, Mr. Szkafarowsky, who has sung principal roles with the New York City Opera and Canadian companies, was signed by the Washington Opera. He will perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York this season.

Ms. Dovhan's concert was the surprise event of the Grazhda's 200l season. A last-minute replacement for Kyivan Anna Kovalko, who was unable to obtain a U.S. visa, the 21-year-old soprano is a Kyiv native who studied at the Kyiv State Conservatory, with subsequent coaching in Munich, Germany, and at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where she is a student. Ms. Dovhan was winner of the Rosa Ponselle Young Classical Singer Competition in 2000, and came to the mountaintop following a series of concerts in Baltimore and Washington, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Ponselle's death.

Speaking of Ms. Dovhan's performances of the Mozart arias "Dove sono" (from "Le Nozze di Figaro") and "Ch'io mi scordi di te," the Freeman wrote: she revealed a lyric instrument with a laser focus, capable of cutting an orchestra in any number of queenly, dramatic roles. ... Her exquisitely tempered voice, able to bear any weight, or sustain pianissimo phrases with fluency and loft, is most amazing for its absolute fusion with a sensibility of soul. There is a prodigy of spirit in this singer as well as a merely marvelous musical gift, that makes her an artist of profound and intimate reach. More than a singing, actress, she's some kind of St. Joan, unconsciously assuming, suffering and celebrating the evocative content of each aria and song."

Touching on Mr. Vynnytsky' s gift to every musician with whom he works it was noted that "Vynnytsky's play enabled the singer's ariel flights and underscored emotion with weightless, intuitively empathetic executions." In Manhattan's studios and chamber music forums, this wizard of volatility has performed and recorded with Ms. Khoma, played Carnegie Hall to a sold-out house with cellist Vagram Saradjian, as co-winners of the Young Artists Distinguished Artist Award, and has appeared at Connecticut's Music Mountain as guest artist with the Leontovych and St. Petersburg string quartets, and this summer with the Zapolski Royal String Quartet of Denmark and with jazz piano virtuoso Adam Makowicz ("The Chopin Connection" at the Windham Chamber Music Festival in Windham, N.Y.) What he shares in chamber music performance is a facet of his genius.

Mr. Slobodyanik has been compared to the legendary Sviatoslav Richter, the mentor who first sent him to the United States. Mykola Suk, the pianist who opened the Grazhda season this year, playing Mozart, Chopin, Revutsky and Kolessa, is said to resemble Brendel. (Unable to attend this first concert, but elsewhere acquainted with Mr. Suk's play, we amend this publicist's claim to resemblance by suggesting that if Brendel, who is famed for his elf-bell clarity of execution, ever made a Faustian pact with the devil to connect his technical facility with all the forces between heaven and hell, then he would resemble Suk.) Mr. Vynnytsky, however, stands unique. Beyond a fluency that lifts lines off the keyboard, beyond thunderbolt power play, or discernible sentiments rising from the archive of all souls, his keyboard artistry is transcendant, from a sphere where dream knits up, before form. Offered in a solo recital at the Grazhda, between his obligations as accompanist, the rendition of a Mozart sonata as played by Mr. Vynnytsky severed every earthly care and tie of the beholder's heart, loosing it like a helium balloon.

Kitty Montgomery is a writer whose commentary on classical musicians performing in the Hudson Valley and New York City has been reprinted in Chamber Music America, Musical America, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Nominated for the Pew Charitable Trust's Distinguished Arts Journalism Award, for "writers who will make a difference in the direction of American criticism," the eclectic range of her music reviews encompasses world beat artists Youssou N'Dour, Ladysmith Black Membaza and Santana, young jazz legends Eric Person and Jason Marsalis, and rock groups performing in the Woodstock area, whose publicists employ the imagery and perception of her work in their promotions. Excerpts of these pop pieces have been read on National Public Radio.

Vincent Wagner, artistic director of Woodstock's Maverick Concerts, featuring world-class string quartets over six decades, referred to Ms. Montgomery as "the only critic in the business, who recreates the energy of a performance in a review."

Ms. Montgomery is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and former doctoral candidate in the department of comparative religion at Columbia University. Her artistic background includes study at Northwestern Drama School and the Juilliard School.

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