The novelty was presented by the Kyiv Soloists chamber ensemble and the well-known conductor Kirill Karabits (Germany). The Instrumental Aria was found in the so-called Bach Archive, a part of the Berlin Singing Academy’s music library that keeps a huge collection of scores and manuscripts by the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach and other 17th-18th-century authors, which were kept in Kyiv after World War Two and restituted to Germany in the early 2000s. Researchers at Magdeburg’s Telemann Center have classified the Aria as the 11th part of Georg Philipp Telemann’s suite Water Music, the best-known baroque cycle. Kirill Karabits, who takes active interest in this Ukraine-related archive, was invited to perform this piece. It is Karabits and Capella Leopoldina that performed for the first time in May 2005 Telemann’s thitherto unknown opera Musical Pastoral, also found in this archive, whose concert-recorded version was published on the Capriccio label.
The Aria is a small slow-tempo piece, where an endless melody overlaps the “pacing” bass. This superb part deserves to become as big a hit as other fragments of the suite.
Another important event of the soiree is the first performance of Concerto for Piano and Strings in D minor by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Ukraine. Michael Rische, a professor at higher music schools in Cologne and Leipzig, came to Kyiv to attend the Ukrainian premiere sponsored by Goethe-Institut. He is also a discoverer of old-time scores and the 1920s music. In 2010 Rische triggered a wave of international response by making public Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s previously unpublished piano concertos. One of the newly discovered scores reached Kyiv. The Cologne Higher Music School has different-epoch pianos, and it is possible to play these pieces there as closely to the original as possible. Yet the pianist had to play a modern-day piano in Kyiv, which somewhat upset the audience, but they undoubtedly enjoyed his magnificent feeling of Bach’s epoch.
The concert at the National Philharmonic Society was a brilliant event in the seasonal program of Kyiv Soloists. Next in the line are joint performances with violinist Valerii Sokolov and conductor Oksana Lyniv (Austria), the international-level Ukrainian stars now in the height of their fame. As the soiree showed, this kind of cooperation is quite worthwhile for the now rejuvenated team which is improving, from event to event, not only its technical mastery, but also its sense of style.
