The night. How much this part of our 24-hour cycle holds within it! Just think about what you associate with the night: the calm of your mother’s lullaby, dreamy contemplation of the stars, or, perhaps, ghostly dreams? Today, unfortunately, the night is associated with the wail of air raid sirens that ruthlessly pierce the silence for many Ukrainians.
Yet, there is one trait that unites all these experiences — at night, everything takes on a sense of transience. Japanese folk beliefs say that when twilight falls, the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and the afterlife world can “meet” the world of the living. Whether this is true or not, we all keenly sense that clear outlines blur and take on new forms beneath the dark veil.
Night has always been a source of inspiration for literature, painting, theater, cinema, and, of course, music. Today we will listen to our own Ukrainian night, the most familiar and intimate, poetic enough to send a chill down one’s spine, and thrilling enough to cause an ache in one’s chest.
This selection features ten works by Ukrainian composers that depict the night in its various manifestations. Perhaps you might recognize the one closest to your heart among these compositions.
Evening. Sylvestrov
The magic of the night begins as early as the evening, whenwarm watercolor hues of twilight soften, quiet, and bring the relentless day to a halt.
As the evening follows the day, one can say that Valentyn Sylvestrov went through a somewhat similar change in his musical career. According to the composer, the experimental avant-garde of his early work eventually shifted toward quiet, metaphysical music. There is something very human about this “shift.” Indeed, after a hectic day, when you’re here and there, juggling a hundred tasks, conversations, and thoughts, you calm down, ground yourself, and allow yourself to listen to yourself and the world around you. The evening contemplation turns into meditation, like Evening Serenade from Sylvestrov’s Quiet Music cycle.
Lullabies. Barvinsky, Shchetynsky, and Yushkevych
Let’s recall the night as seen through a child’s eyes. The evening has passed, it’s time to wrap up all the important tasks, but you don’t want to since there are still so many plays and games that you haven’t finished! Yet, you are powerless against your mother’s plea, and your eyelids respond to the spell of a lullaby, which, like a soft blanket, descends, soothes, caresses, and carries you off into dreams.
Ukrainian lullabies nurture, protect, and instill in a child’s soul a love for the homeland. This was likely the case in Vasyl Barvinsky’s life. His father, Oleksandr, was an educator who introduced the Ukrainian language to schools in Galicia. His mother, Yevheniya, was a singer and pianist who, from early childhood, instilled in the composer a love for music and for lullabies.
Read also: Vasyl Barvinsky: A Composer Without Boundaries
Even in the face of the harsh blows dealt by the Soviet regime, Barvinsky turned to lullabies which, though seemingly like a children’s genre, were, in fact, a place of safety and love.
The dialogue between Son and Drimota [Sleep and Drowsiness]from the lullaby “Oh, chody’t son kolo vikon” (“Oh, Sleep Is Walking”) comes to life in Oleksandr Shchetynsky’s Lullaby. In Shchetynsky’s work, we, like Barvinsky, return to the Ukrainian folk song, a talisman that brings peace in times filled with pain and fear.
Shchetynsky’s music is particularly moving because it iscomposed for the gentle, subdued, narrative voice of the viola da gamba, a six-stringed Spanish instrument from the Renaissance era for which, likely, no music has been written for over 400 years.
Another interpretation of a Ukrainian folk lullaby appears in Serhii Yushkevych’s Arrangement of the Ukrainian Lullaby “Kotyk/Kitty”, better known as “Kotyku Sirenkyi” [“Grey Kitty”].
This composition is included in the album Music of Kharkiv, recorded by Kharkiv pianist Maksym Shadko. The performer noted that the polytonal arrangement of the lullaby sounds “somewhat allegorical and surreal.” The listener, as if in a dream, can try to stroll along this ethereal, ghostly (audio) path together with the little gray cat.
Read also: Music of Kharkiv. Ukrainian Piano Album Full of Tenderness
Nocturne. Bortkevych and Lyudkevych
If a serenade is an evening confession of love, then a nocturne occurs later, when the city is plunged into darkness, and your heart feels already full, contemplating the moonlit night.
Serhii Bortkevych’s Nocturne bears the programmatic title “Diana”, likely referencing the goddess of the moon. The piece was dedicated to the wife of the Yugoslav ambassador, Natalia Haponich. She invited Bortkevych to play at musical evenings she organized at Yugoslav’s embassy. Indeed, this music radiates gratitude and tenderness. The piano sounds spread out unhurriedly, like ripples on water that change the shape of the moon in their reflections.
Stanislav Lyudkevych’s Trio Nocturne takes us into the atmosphere of a Galician night. In this music, we recognize the Ukrainian folk song “Oy, ne svity, misyachenku” [“Don’t shine, the moon”]. Like the lyrics in “Oy, ne svity, misyachenku”, Lyudkevych’s Nocturne is filled with longing, anxieties, and tender memories, illuminated here and there by moonlight. At the same time, Lyudkevych’s music echoes his youth, since this Trio Nocturne for violin, viola, and piano the composer wrote when he was only 26 years old.
Nachtmusic [Night Music]. Lunyov
Svyatoslav Lunyov’s Nachtmusik for Strings [Night Music] is not at all about the coziness of the evening, a mother’s love in a lullaby, or the romance of a nocturne. On the contrary, paradox and experimentation permeate every part of his Nachtmusic: Evening Intrusion, Lullaby Serenade, Deep Eclogue [eclogue is a genre of pastoral poetry], and Irregular Dawn.
The night in Lunyov’s Nachtmusik unsettles, startles, and is undeniably intriguing.
Read also: Svyatoslav Lunyov: Music of Memory, Music of Hope
The Voice of the Night. Ishchenko and Hrabovsky
Yuriy Ishchenko’s Night Shadows is a post-Romantic interpretation of Mykhailo Semenko’s poetry. Lyrics and music are combined with mystical moods and a shifting, anxious contemplation in this work. Ischenko never left any program notes but, according to his student, composer Alla Zagaykevych,
“Yuriy Ishchenko spoke of this particular work and others, set to the lyrics of 20th-century poets, as an attempt to revive the poetry of the Executed Renaissance [a generation of Ukrainian artists from the 1920s and 1930s who were repressed and destroyed by the Soviet regime—ed.] as poetry of forbidden beauty, too refined and poetic to survive during the Soviet era. The musical idiom of Night Shadows clearly corresponds to the early modern era and resembles the style of Borys Lyatoshynsky (under whom Ishchenko studied).”
Leonid Hrabovsky’s song cycle “Pastels”, based on poems by Pavlo Tychyna, offers a view of the cycle of the day: Morning, Day, Evening, and Night. The poet and composer created a palette of timbres that depict the fleeting moments of a rapidly fading day.
While the first part of the cycle is filled with flashes and lightning bolts flying from one extreme to another (Morning, Day), the second part, calming down and fading away, is a sonoristic sketch that stands out not for its form, but for its coloring, shades, and moods.
Read also: Listening to Ukrainian music: “Pastels” of Leonid Hrabovsky
The Opera Nitch [Night]. Maksym Kolomiiets
The centerpiece of this collection is Maksym Kolomiiets’s opera Nitch [Night] (2021), a monumental work that explores amonumental nighttime.
This opera offers a contemporary take on the Ukrainian song “Nitch yaka misyachna” [“What a Moonlit Night”]. Librettist Taras Frolov tells the story of the tender feelings of a young man and woman who find and lose each other across different eras: at a 19th-century fair, during World War II, and in a modern subway.
Night becomes more than just a part of the day cycle in Kolomiiets’s work and embodies the memories, passions, and losses of its characters, uniting the past and the present in a single emotional realm.
It is heartening that there are far more examples of Ukrainian music about the night than are included in this selection. Regrettably, however, many such compositions have not been recorded or are available only in poor-quality recordings. We hope it is only a matter of time until new recordings are available. For now, let’s listen to what we have, and we do have quite a lot: mystical, tender, paradoxical, illuminated, and darkmusic about Ukrainian night…
Did you find “your” night here?
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