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The Light Waters of Old Music. “Lvivska Hazeta”, 27th October, 2004.

These days the festival of old music, initiated by the music specialist Roman Stelmashchuk and supported by various international organizations and the department of foreign relations of Lviv City Council, came to an end. It is the second year that in October our city enjoys the sounds of old music performed by Ukrainian and foreign participants. The adequacy of the event, the topicality of the dialogue with the past was proved by the audience itself, which crowded the Lviv Hall of the Organ Music during every concert. On the whole, there were eight of them in the period from 7th to 22nd of October, though the artistic director of the event, R. Stelmashchuk, considers some of the concerts (we wrote about them in our previous articles) – for example, “Gregorian Chorals and the Poetry of Reiner Maria Rilke” and the mourning songs in the St. Anthony Cathedral - a prelude to the festival.

The real start to the festival was given by the concert “Vita Nova” of the ensemble “Lvivski Menestreli”. For a couple of years now this ensemble unites both professionals and amateur musicians, all of whom are in love with old music, under the artistic direction of Lena Slopak. The programme of the concert seemed a little too varied at first, as it comprised the works of different European schools of the 12th -14th cent., but proved to be a successful debut at the festival. It stood comparison even with the next evening’s musical performance, where professionals form Chekh and Slovak Republic played.

The concert called “Aure Vaghe, Aure Gioconde” filled, as it seemed, the hall of the cathedral with “fresh, light and gentle waters” of the early Baroque music (as Ihor Hertsoh, the director of the Chekh ensemble, put it). The works of the predecessors of this chimerical style, such as Julio Caccini, Girolamo Frescobaldi or TArkvinio Merula, are indeed rarely played now. In this respect, the  female vocalist Petra Noskajova, blow-instruments player Yana Semyradova and Ihor Hertsoh (the arch-lute) not only professionally retrieved the authentic spirit of this music, but recreated the image of the whole epoch by the proper decoration of the stage.

On the contrary, what promised to be the culmination point of the festival – the long-awaited concert of the “revived” (hence the name) Renaissance music ensemble “Vita Nova” – failed the expectations. About ten years ago its members ruled the musical “underground” in Lviv and Kyiv, which could be compared only to the specific Lviv rock culture. Although all of them were graduates in natural or technical sciences, all their free time was devoted to their unusual hobby - old music. Their re-union ten years later, for which some of them came from Kyiv or St. Petesburg, was considered breaking news. However, the concert was a disappointment. The audience who didn’t know the history of the ensemble was outraged by the low standard of performance of the ambitious Renaissance programme. It seemed like the musicians got lost in its labirynths at the very beginning of the concert, and only towards the end they managed to finally find their way out of the musical conwebs.

A small but conceptual part of the festival’s programme was devoted to the old Ukrainian music. The student ensemble of Lviv Music Academy Cacophony directed by Dean Taras Hrudov introduced the listeners into the world of church monody – this musical icon in our spriritual heritage. The well-known project “Irmos” brought to life by Natalka Polovynka and Serhiy Kovalevych invited religious practitioners and simply admirers of old spiritual singing for the evening mass in the Church of St. Michael the Archangel.

The excursion into old music ended by a very interesting and promising project that also heralded the next year’s  festival on the 9th-20th October 2005 (as written in the informative and exquisitely designed hand-out). “The Pilgrim Songs of Medieval Spain – terra incognita”- was a good treat both for the specialists and admirers of music history. The songs were performed by the vocal formation “A cappella Leopolis” and “Decameron” from Warsaw. The two ensembles gained good professional reputation during the last year’s festival and this year they made a real show. The court and the church, the choral and the dance – such was the outlook of a man in the Middle Ages. On coming for the joint prayer to the square of the Sant-Iago di Compostella monastery, people prayed with and by music and entertained themselves with music. Sometimes meditative in mood, and other times having great rhythmical drive, the pilgrim songs provided the audience with extraordinary impressions. Proving that the interest in old music has never been so topical.

Lidiya Mel’nyk