Music program ‘Imaginary Dances’

Dance is one of the brightest symbols of unity. The vast number of dances is aimed at making a contact, both visual and tactile. The feeling of unity is incredibly powerful, but isn’t it illusory? Interestingly, the Greek dance sirtaki – a visual demonstration of friendship – which is performed by dancers embracing each other is a kind of mystification: it does not exist in folklore; the dance elements were invented in 1964 for the feature film Zorba the Greek. But how many people do remember this?

The central theme of this year’s Music Program is a non-idealized neighborhood. Danceness permeates, to one degree or another, all the concerts, but close hugs are not always a symbol of peace.

The musical and theatrical performance based on David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, performed by the Alter Ratio contemporary music vocal ensemble and featuring director Dmytro Kostyumynskyi weirdly intertwines horror and beauty. The main character is a girl dying of cold due to the indifference of her neighbors. The dance appears here both at the level of contemporary plastics and in the rhythm of the vocal line. And the energy of rejection in it is not less than the desire for unity.

The most famous Ukrainian pianist of the younger generation, exquisite aristocratic Antonii Baryshevskyi, who is adored by music lovers for ecstatic Messiaen and inspiring Beethoven, will appear for the first time before the general public together with inventor and electronic music player Ostap Kostyuk. Phenomena of different worlds that do not touch, the cloud nine of piano playing and the pulsating magma of electronic rhythms will merge into a common ecstatic dance.

The charitable foundation Vere Music Fund will present the noble music of the ‘Mozart of Lviv’: Franz Xaver Mozart, son of Wolfgang Amadeus, who dedicated 30 years of his life to Lviv. Was Ukraine a part of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century? Is the Ukrainian music a part of the European musical tradition? Young musicians will not philosophize in vain but recreate the rhythms of those times.

At the last concert, Ensemble Nostri Temporis from Kyiv together with German-Ukrainian clarinet player Yevhen Orkin will play the works by Stravinsky, Cage and Ligeti, which were created in hard post-war times. Post-war fear contrasts noticeably with an emphasis on dance rhythms in these opuses, giving their cheerfulness a certain breakdown, such as a wry smile of a man who has fatally quickly matured.

For all these concerts, dance is as imaginary as a friendly unity. However, isn’t the physical feeling of rhythms, despite the lack of visual observation of the dance, a pulsating proof of the existence of total imperceptible unity, even when the belief in it is completely undermined?