music of Ukrainian composers

In the current crisis, one supports efforts to display the Ukrainian flag a bit. And those of us with heads in classical music can further show our offstage support for this beleagured country by listening to music of Ukrainian composers. But who are Ukrainian composers? Here I have to explain a bit about the cultural identity of Ukraine.

When Putin says that Ukraine is really part of Russia, what he means is that in the days of the Soviet Union, and even more those of the Russian Empire, the state was a single socio-economic entity. One thing this means is that people moved about the state and conducted their cultural careers irrespective of internal borders, and indeed in imperial days there really weren't any. Even occupied Poland was fully incorporated into the Russian state after 1832. But this applies to nations far more culturally distinct from Russia than Ukraine or even Poland.

Take, for instance, Aram Khachaturian. Unquestionably an Armenian, proud of his nationality and reflecting his national character in his music. But he was born in what is now the nation of Georgia, because ethnicities geographically mingled. And as a citizen of the USSR, he went to its cultural center of Moscow to study and essentially lived there for the rest of his life. But he was still Armenian, and his physical absence in Russia doesn't mean Armenia is any less of a country. And this applies also to Ukraine.

So we can find composers who are ethnically Ukrainian, and we can also play landsmanship as you'll see below. Here's Wikipedia's list. Let's run down through a few whose works I know.

Valentyn Silvestrov
Now aged 84, he's the most distinguished and widely played internationally of distinctly Ukrainian composers. Like his near age-mate Arvo Pärt (Estonian), he started out as a modernist and gradually turned to religiously and liturgically inspired music, though he doesn't share Pärt's minimalist tendencies. I know him best for his somber and Shostakovich-inspired Symphony No. 5, but his other later symphonies have equal weight and seriousness, notably the Symphony No. 8 from only about ten years ago.

Borys Lyatoshinsky
Soviet-era composer and Silvestrov's teacher, also distinctly Ukrainian by ethnicity. Something of a modernist who uncomfortably accommodated himself with Soviet restrictions. His best-known orchestral work is a short and rather hushed Fantastic March from 1920, thus predating those strictures.

Reinhold Glière
Late-imperial composer of the generation of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, who stayed on into Soviet days. Teacher of both Lyatoshinsky (above) and Prokofiev (below). Not generally thought of as Ukrainian, due to spending most of his career in Russia and having a German father (though he respelled his surname to look French). But he had Ukrainian ancestry on his mother's side, he was born and raised in Kyiv, and he displayed Ukrainian nationalism in his music. His magnum opus was an epically-long and dark-toned Symphony No. 3, titled "Ilya Muromets" and inspired by a folk hero of that name of medieval Kievan Rus days, when (as Ukrainians like to point out) Kyiv was the capital of a powerful state and Moscow was but a tributary village.
But one other piece of Glière's has earned immortality far beyond any fame his name can carry. After 20 seconds into this piece you will say, "Oh, yes: that." It's a dance movement from an early Soviet ballet called The Red Poppy. Whenever moviemakers or the like want music that instantly conveys a warning message of "uh-oh, the Russians are coming," they choose this. It is the most purely Russian music ever written, and it's by a Ukrainian, so there.


Now we'll get into the landsmanship stakes, finding famous composers with an association with Ukraine even if they lack a personal Ukrainian identity.

Sergei Prokofiev
Not Ukrainian by ancestry at all, but he was born and spent his early childhood on an estate in what is now eastern Ukraine, where his father was working as a soil engineer. This was before the current boundaries were drawn, but Prokofiev's home region is madly proud of him: they hold a music festival in his honor and have named an airport after him. There isn't much Ukrainian about Prokofiev's music, though like Glière he wrote a piece honoring a hero of Kievan Rus days, the 13th century prince Alexander Nevsky, in the form of the music for Eisenstein's 1938 film. Of this, the Battle on the Ice, depicting Nevsky's defeat of the Teutonic Knights on the frozen Lake Peipus, is the most memorable part.

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky wasn't Ukrainian either, but he was visiting his sister's family at their estate in central Ukraine when he wrote his Symphony No. 2. He happened to hear their butler singing a Ukrainian folk song called "The Crane." Tchaikovsky was charmed enough to use it as the main theme for the finale of his symphony. (It's a simple melody undercutting a grand fanfare version that occupies the first 45 seconds of the movement.) Ever since, the work has been known as the "Little Russian" Symphony, because, so help me, "Little Russia" was the common name for Ukraine at the time. (Not any more, OK?)

Mykola (Nikolai) Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky
And now for something completely different. This circa-1800 nobleman and patron of his own private orchestra occupies a special place among Ukrainian composers because he is A HOAX. Sources differ on whether a man of this name existed, but as a composer he is ENTIRELY FICTIONAL. His symphony was written purely as a dig at prejudiced Soviet music critics.
Here's the story. Mikhail Goldstein was a composer from Odessa, who was criticized in the 1940s for using Ukrainian themes in his music on the grounds that, as the son of immigrants and - even more - as a Jew, he could not appreciate Ukrainian culture and shouldn't be using it. Incensed, Goldstein decided to get his own back by conveniently "finding" in an archive a "long-forgotten" Haydnesque symphony with an impeccably Ukrainian pedigree and, of course, using Ukrainian folk music. It was praised as a great discovery, certified as authentic, widely performed, and recorded by the distinguished conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. Then Goldstein revealed that he'd written it; it was a hoax.
Was Goldstein denounced as a traitor to Soviet music and hounded out of the country? Or did the authorities merely shrug and continue to claim that the original attribution was accurate? Bizarrely, both these things are true. Goldstein went to Germany, and when I first came across reference to Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky in the 1970s, sources following Soviet info still depicted it as authentic.
You can judge this rather charming little piece for yourself here with the original recording by Mravinsky.