Concert notes by Maestro Andrew Koehler, conductor of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia, about Yevhen Stankovych’s “Ukrainian Requiem.” (Excerpted from the concert program book.)
…in the very year after the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine declared itself – finally, after centuries of domination from others – an independent nation, the celebrated composer Yevhen Stankovych turned his attentions to composing a Requiem for those victims of the Holodomor. A Requiem with an unapologetic text from his contemporary colleague, poet Dmytro Pavlychko, which does not shirk from proclaiming the truth of what happened. A Requiem that somehow only now, at this performance, is receiving its North American premiere. It is as extraordinary an act of testament as it is a work of art.
Stankovych’s Requiem exists in several liminal spaces at once – it transitions between paroxysms of discordance, compositional techniques of the avant-garde that Stankovych knew and used in the first part of his career, while mostly relying on the plain-spoken vocabulary of his later work; it embodies the full human response to tragedy, moving from supplication to rage to lament to acceptance; it hovers between a spiritual world, invoking Orthodox chants and the profundity of belief, and the earthly suffering of starvation.
The first of 15 interconnected movements, all performed without pause, begins in complete stillness: a single note, intoned from all corners of the orchestra, provides an unwavering backdrop to a lamenting violin solo and statements of “Amen” from the two choruses. The next movement proclaims God’s strength and models it, too, in vigorous rising lines punctuated by percussion.
The first appearance of a narrator (Stefan Szkafarowsky) – declaiming Pavlychko’s text – calls for us to remember those years of starvation. A warm bass solo opens the third movement, as he recalls work on the land and what it meant to Ukrainians; but at the words “on Satan’s orders” a fearsome shout arises from the depths of the chorus and pushes the music to a dissonant fanfare. A final prayer for God’s intervention ends the movement.
The succeeding music channels a folk idiom, dotted with the warnings of shrill woodwinds, to help us hear the horrors experienced in the villages; it is followed by a return to spiritual contemplation. The propulsive sixth movement depicts the unstoppable drive of the “red banners” to commit and ignore their crimes.
The very center of the work, literally and emotionally, is the seventh movement’s moving soprano solo; Stankovych here requests the less embellished sound of a folk, rather than operatic, singer (Nina Matviyenko) Her words are those of a dying child’s, pleading with her mother to ensure that they might once again meet in heaven.
…The eighth movement is textless and begins with a violin solo of increasingly frantic desperation; this leads to a wordless chorus singing the lamenting theme of the first movement while anxious string rhythms play out overtop. The ninth revisits the terrible fanfare and the narrator’s initial request to remember, while the 10th recalls music of the child’s lament under additional narration. We are returned to prayerful contemplation in the next movement, then a hushed recollection of the village theme (appropriately in a fleetingly brief movement where the narrator reads “silently, like a candle, the people burned out”), and an even more ferocious homage to God’s strength.
After one final dissonant fanfare, the 14th movement – an energetic, rhythmically vivacious “Alleluia” – begins in earnest. It feels as if this might end the work, but Stankovych, composing in the first year in which he would have been free to even acknowledge this atrocity, pointedly returns to a place of remembrance for the finale. The Alleluia is cut off with a scream from the orchestra, but then met with profound calm. The choruses sing the words “eternal memory,” the traditional ending of the Orthodox requiem liturgy. In the final “Amen,” the last of many such gestures, Stankovych opts to unexpectedly conclude on a major chord, a sliver of illuminating brightness…