O-Fest was founded by an artistically and economically successful team – Kyiv National Operetta Artistic Director Bohdan Strutynsky and Bucha City Council Chairman Anatolii Fedoruk. This year the forum was sponsored by the embassies of Bulgaria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova; the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Polish Institute in Kyiv. In addition to these countries, Belarus, Canada, China, Lithuania, Germany, Rumania, Slovakia, and Ukraine also took part.
Musical was the leading theme of O-Fest 2015. Eighteen soloists from 13 countries performed Broadway and French hits first in the open air at Bucha’s Central Landscape Park and then on the stage of Kyiv’s National Operetta.
“Small towns, such as Bucha, are quite suitable for international-scale events,” Fedoruk says, “and this kind of cultural events make the example of Europeanization.” And, in the view of Strutynsky, O-Fest develops theater and projects a positive image of Ukraine, which is necessary for the development of tourism. “Culture is the ideology of a state,” the National Operetta’s artistic director asserts.
“Is it not international festivals and picturesque Ukrainian sceneries that can best reveal Ukraine’s potential?” Mariana Bondarenko, a representative of the Austrian Cultural Forum, pointed out that Austria was already referring to the festival as a “voice of the world.” This “voice is indispensable not only as a loudspeaker to all the sides of the world. It is extremely necessary and useful inside the country – for example, for the Ukrainian soldiers stationed in the ATO zone and for eastern migrants. “It is culture that will revive us,” Strutynsky says assuredly, “at least to help us receive positive energy and relax so that we could recoup our strength in the future, the strength that will ruin the negative.”
For this reason, artists and writers are not only taking part in defending the country (for example, the National Opera’s leading soloist Serhii Avdieiev is a captain in the missile forces), but also support the soldiers through cultural and educational activities, raising funds, making theater productions, holding concerts in the ATO zone. Incidentally, several dozen Ukrainian soldiers, invited to the Bucha grand concert, were given a standing ovation.
The program of the grand concert “In the Genre of Musical” was prepared by the National Operetta team, and soloists performed so impressively that the concert hall burst every time into a thunderous applause. This was the reaction to marvelous arias, duets, and musical compositions from the world-famous musicals Cabaret by John Kander, West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein, My Fair Lady by Frederick Loewe, the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber, performed by Alexander Mutafchiyski (Bulgaria), Anna Bespalova (Kazakhstan), Stephania Romanik (Canada), Lilia Solomei (Moldova), Alfredo Pascu (Rumania), Igor Kucer (Slovakia), Gitana Piackaite (Lithainia), and, naturally, National Operetta soloists.
