A concert at the National Philharmonic Society allowed the audience to relish the exuberant timbres of symphonic scores by such classics as Claude Debussy, Jacques Ibert, Francis Poulenc, and Maurice Ravel. The soiree’s program consisted of the works that represent one of the most interesting art epochs in the late 19th – early 20th centuries, when European culture was embracing a new esthetics of art, particularly impressionism.
The French music of that period requires that players have an especially refined taste and high culture of musical articulation, and are capable of reproducing a characteristic charm of elegant, plastic, extravagant, and sometimes even shocking images.
The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine conducted by Volodymyr Sirenko, the soloists Maria Vikhliaieva (piano) and Myroslava Sirenko (flute) performed throughout the concert as closely-knit like-minded artists who felt and subtly reacted to the conductor’s energetic messages, and the powerful waves of their emotions, which were literally pouring out into the hall, immediately gripped the audience.
The symphony orchestra prelude to Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun (1894) opened the soiree. A moving solo of the flute, which personifies the image of a dreaming faun, against the background of the sound of a harp’s strings, is always accompanied by the panpipe-like timbres of other woodwinds and firmly keeps the listener in a pastoral and idyllic mood.
Ibert’s concerto for flute and orchestra (1932) was played by a young soloist, Myroslava Sirenko. The composer dedicated this extremely virtuosic oeuvre to Marcel Moyse, one of the most prominent representatives of the 20th-century French flute school. The young musician quite managed to put the author’s idea across to the audience. As it is no secret that it was a “family show” of sorts, The Day asked Myroslava about the details of the cooperation of the Sirenkos’ two artistic generations.
“I debuted on professional stage when I was a last-year student at the National Music Academy of Ukraine, but even before this I had had an opportunity to play Mozart’s flute concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra,” Myroslava Sirenko confessed.
Ibert’s concerto is part of highly professional flutists’ repertoire.
“Indeed, it is very complicated technically, but its music is extremely beautiful. Past year I played this oeuvre in my class only, and when father said I could perform it at a concert, I gladly agreed.”
I wonder what kind of relations your father and you maintain on the concert stage – do the family links hinder?
“On the contrary, we understand each other very well, and father always gives the soloist as much freedom as possible.
“The conductor Sirenko made full use of the energy accumulated in the concert’s first part in two major works, as the soiree was drawing to a close. A superb ensemble of the pianist Maria Vikhliaieva and the orchestra brought to the audience the pastoral beauty, ingenuousness, and vivacity of Poulenc’s Concert champetre for harpsichord (piano) and orchestra.
“What became the soiree’s dynamic acme is the choreographic poem Waltz, a large-scale symphonic work by Ravel, where the maestro and the orchestra musicians fully revealed their mastery.
“The well-known conductor Ivan Hamkalo was right to say after the concert: ‘French music is a special world, and it really becomes closer to us when true professionals – artists in every sense of the word – put it across to us, as it happed just now.’”
Natalia Semenenko is a music expert
