On November 15, Kyiv’s Palace of Art “Ukrainian Home” hosted Olha Bohomolets’s charity concert “Jazz Romance.” The singer decided to sing some favorite romances in the jazz style together with a jazz quartet. This concert has a few philosophical underpinnings. Last year Olha Bohomolets was hospitalized with a fractured spine after a truck crashed into her car. Her right hand was paralyzed. How would she be able to play the guitar? Today her hand is functional, except for two fingers. Today, this author of excellent lyrics and music can play only a few songs on the guitar. Another inspiration was her 15-year-old son Andriy, who recently graduated from the preparatory department of the Gliere College of Music in Kyiv. He believes that Ukrainian music should have more style and be more modern. “That was how I tried to adapt my passions and romance to modern times; I asked Oleksandr Yehorov, a noted musician, to write some instrumental arrangements,” says Olha Bohomolets. “My son liked them and I was very happy.” She also made a video clip titled “Lullaby” especially for the concert. The song is set to lyrics by Mykola Vinhranovsky. “When I manage to come home earlier and see my son and daughter watching TV, I feel scared. I remember the days when we all watched Grandpa Panas and listened to his bedtime story every evening. That was how we conceived the idea of a clip as a present for all children.” The clip features characters from the luxuriously illustrated books of the A-Ba-Ba-Ha-La-Ma-Ha Publishers (e.g., The Snow Queen and the ABC), as well as miniature fairies from the canvases of the modern Ukrainian painter Yevheniya Hapchynska. I hope we will soon be viewing it on our television screens at home.
This was Olha Bohomolets’s tenth charity concert. For several years now the proceeds of such concerts have been donated to her private Laser Medicine Clinic, which provides treatment for “socially unprotected” children with vascular tumors. Money was also donated to the town of Skole (Ivano-Frankivsk oblast) for a monument to Taras Shevchenko and to erect crosses on the graves of shistdesiatnyky [poets of the sixties] at Kyiv cemeteries; and to the Maliatko Daycare Center in Kyiv. She has also given concerts at correction houses for juvenile delinquents in central Ukraine.
It was a chamber music concert. Olha Bohomolets sang to the accompaniment of a flute, sax, double bass, guitar, and piano. Her songs must have been very familiar to everyone in the audience. She noted once that Lina Kostenko’s poems are like texts from the Scriptures for all women. One can find there lines about love, betrayal, separation, despair, grief, and joy; one understands that all this has been experienced by others. She performed “Nedumano, nehadano” (Never Dreamed of, Never Expected), “Osinniy den’” (Autumn Day), “Liubov i lito” (Love and Summer), “V pusteli syzykh vechoriv” (In the Desert of Gray Evenings), “U svitli zlomu i kholodnomu” (In a Cold and Angry Light), “Moya liubov” (My Love) set to Lina Kostenko’s lyrics; songs based on Mykola Vinhranovsky’s verse (“Zupynylas’ tysha” (Quiet at a Standstill), “Lullaby)”; and her own compositions “Saxophone,” “Dobryi vechir” (Good Evening) and “Yalynka” (Pine Tree). Her themes and chords are often inspired by life itself. For example, the music of “In a Cold and Angry Light” was born after her husband left on a business trip and she found herself so very alone. Singing “My Love,” she instantly sees her distant ancestors reaching as far back as the fifteenth century, all of them from aristocratic families. She is especially fond of remembering her great-grandmother Sofia, who headed the Narodnaya Volya’s South Rus’ Workers’ Union in Kyiv; after her arrest she gave birth to her son Oleksandr Bohomolets (the future president of the Academy of Sciences) at Lukianivka Prison. Today, Olha Bohomolets is the successor of this aristocratic family, faithfully upholding its traditions.
The general mood of the concert was that of early autumn, when the sun still shines, when it is still warm and the earth is adorned with a rich carpet of dark yellow leaves, and of late autumn, with its slush and rain — a jazzy autumn. Thank you, Olha!
