The new season opening at the National Philharmonic Society shows that the “new ideology” from the Soviet mold is all ready to get and keep music under control.
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, and things are not as bad as they seem. Maybe it is normal for a new philharmonic season to start with a so-called Spiritual Function involving religious and political figures, when the historic anthem “God, Great and One” is performed in the foyer by a church and secular choir in the opening ceremony of the Sacred Art Exhibition (with Christian icons on display, made by Mykola Storozhenko’s students and the Art Academy’s Restoration Chair) and when huge baskets of flowers are carried onstage, not the old Soviet patterns of red carnations, but the new independent ones of yellow gerberas and bluets. In fact, the first part of the concert was kept in full conformity with the ideological program. The Symphony Orchestra (with Mykola Diadura as conductor and Yevhen Rzhanov as solo pianist) struck up Levko Revutsky’s concerto In Memoriam of Mykola Lysenko. The music is faultless ideologically, with the right dedication and created by the right national composer. Aesthetically, it reminds one of the pastime and attendant music of Soviet workers as heroes of very old and ideologically very straight Soviet movies. Revutsky was a great composer, granted. Yet on the eve of the third millennium his Concerto No. 2 in F Major in Memoriam of Mykola Lysenko does sound like gross self-parody (in a way it is like starting a new textbook on Ukrainian literature with Maksym Rylsky’s Soviet-inspired poem “My Ukraine” with its lines about the bloodthirsty nationalist beasts, instead of looking up his collections of excellent lyrical verse and including something really good). In fact, the NPS people are the last who should be blamed. After all, how can one reject an offer to participate in the NDP’s Spiritual Ukraine program, considering one’s own financial straits or resist public opinion; one of the principal questions voiced at the news conference was why the NPS repertoire contains more world classics than Ukrainian composers.
Only the second part of the concert made one realize that the philharmonic season had actually started, after the orchestra’s excellent rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The dramatic contrast between the first part with Revutsky’s socialist realism and the second with Berlioz’s grotesque romanticism centered on the hero, a young musician hopelessly in love and with a sick imagination who, in a fit of despair, poisons himself with an opiate concoction, was evidence that the Ukrainian world of art is entering a period of Aesopian language, and that we will once again have to learn to read between the lines.
