The Kyiv Avant-Garde

Online Event
This evening presents five works by leading composers of the Kyiv Avant-Garde. In the 1960s, this group created music that challenged socialist realism – the only acceptable musical and aesthetic style in the USSR. They maintained contacts with composers in Europe and the US and smuggled books about 12-tone music and scores of the Second Viennese School and Polish modernists, in order to diligently study them and “catch-up with the West.” The result, however, was not a replication of Western European post-war avant-garde, but highly original music, which was valued by the audiences on the other side of the Iron Curtain and scorned by the Soviet ideologues in their native Ukraine. 

program

Vitaly Godziatsky, Surface Ruptures (1963) Performed by Anna Shelest
Volodymyr Zahortsev, String Quartet No.1 (1967) Performed by Mivos Quartet
Volodymyr Huba, Confession (1967) Performed by Anna Shelest
Leonid Hrabovsky, Concerto Misterioso (1977) Performed by members of the Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra
—INTERMISSION— 
Valentyn Sylvestrov, Drama (1971) for piano, violin, and cello Performed by Talea Ensemble

7:30 pm Pre-Concert Talk by Peter Schmelz (University of Arizona, Tempe)
8 pm Music performance
10 pm Conclusion of the event

artists

Anna Shelest
Mivos Quartet
Members of the Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra
Talea Ensemble