About 30 military singers-songwriters took part in this patriotic event held on the initiative of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast State Administration. Among the festival participants are 15 novices and as many well-known performers. Soldiers sang on such diverse themes as front-line daily routine, the killed comrades-in-arms, parents and children at home. “All the performers are real ATO participants who wrote songs in the line of duty,” Ivan Nachovnyi, an advisor to the chairman of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast State Administration, pointed out.
ATO fighter Volodymyr Kyiashko is one of the festival participants. He came from the front to sing about his 57th Brigade. “Whenever I am told to write a song, I fail to do so. But this song was born by itself right on the position. The guys and I recorded it at once on the laptop and even made an amateur clip,” he said.
Serhii Shelest, an Odesa Military Academy cadet, presented another song he had written at the front. “When you see your comrades die, words are born by themselves. I wrote the song when I was carrying out a special operation in the ATO zone. It is dedicated to all the mothers whose children are defending this country’s independence,” he said. The music to this song was composed by the Odesa Military Academy cadet Denys Mosiienko. “The maternal prayer saves guys at the front. There are nice words about mothers in Serhii’s poem, and I tried to put them across to as many people as possible. So I composed a tune to the text,” he said.
The festival audience could not fight back tears and stood to applaud to every composition. More than a thousand people cheered up the participants. Those present could also hear a concert of the past year’s winners and see an exhibit of military photographs, a dance of ATO participants and volunteers, etc. It will be recalled that the first all-Ukrainian festival “Songs Born in ATO” was organized by Valentyn Reznychenko’s team and the regional association of ATO fighters in Dnipro in May 2016. Past year festival participants recorded Ukraine’s first disc of ATO songs, which they presented in Kyiv.
