Follow the Fellow #9

Today’s entry is brought to you by Kyiv Contemporary Music Days. ‘Tis the season for great music from Ukraine in Berlin! For eight months now, I’ve been sharing works by Ukrainian composers as a little icing on the cake but you finally have the chance to hear them performed live by amazing musicians at some of Berlin’s coolest venues.

On 1 November, Villa Elisabeth will host this year’s penultimate Kiezsalon. Seasoned music aficionados in Berlin are familiar with this concert series, which typically features three (wildly diverse) acts per night, each playing a 30-minute set with 30-minute breaks in between. This Kiezsalon is the first collaboration between KCMD and Digital in Berlin and we are proud to present a stellar line-up introducing the works of Ukrainian musicians and composers to the Berlin audience.

Berlin-based hornist and performer Samuel Stoll will play a composition by Hanna Hartman along with two world premieres — »Song of Odisseus« by Alla Zagaykevych and »Sonetto che si dissolve tra i monti« by Boris Loginov specially commissioned by KCMD for this event. I have featured Zagaykevych’s work in Follow the Fellow before. Loginov’s versatile oeuvre revolves around concepts of memory and time while leaning toward ambivalence, through the research of mutually exclusive concepts such as presence-absence or subjectivity-objectivity.

Award-winning pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi (who I featured in my previous FtF) will perform a program of new works by Maxim Shalygin, a Ukrainian-born and The Hague-based artist called »one of the Netherlands' most inspired composers« by Hémisphère son.

Finally, composer and sound artist Oleh Shpudeiko better known as Heinali will present his new program Organa, continuing his reimagining of medieval music through modular synthesis. Your attendance is mandatory!

One week later, on 8 November, at Kunstquartier Bethanien, KCMD introduces tvvo:id as part of the esteemed Klangwerkstatt Berlin festival. Theo Nabicht on clarinet, bass clarinet, and contrabass clarinet will interact with Nazarii Stets on double bass — however, the latter will be absent on the stage.

How can you play a duet when the musicians are separated by distance, time, and war? One plays live in Berlin, the other is present as a recording made a few weeks earlier in Kyiv. With the incomplete duo, the Ukrainian concert sends a »signal« from war-ravaged Kyiv to peaceful Berlin. The Ukrainian musician does not know whether the dialog with his counterpart in Berlin will succeed. Here in Berlin, it turns out as a dialog that the other side can't hear.

The program explores how the same events are experienced in different countries and cultures as well as communication across borders. The title, »tvvo:id«, plays with the meanings of »two,« referring to the duo; »void;« and »id« which stands for identifying oneself with the other.

For this project, KCMD has commissioned the Ukrainian composers Anna Arkushyna (WP), Albert Saprykin (WP), and Ihor Zavhorodnii (WP).

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How can I pick one piece to feature here today after introducing so many names you’ll get to hear in Berlin in the upcoming weeks? The answer is: blindly and with my heart.

Here’s Nazarii Stets and the National Ensemble of Soloists Kyiv Camerata (conductor Nataliia Stets) playing Mykhailo Chedryk’s “Sonare for Double Bass and Ensemble” (2024) in Kyiv earlier this year. That’s how our home sounds.

»Follow the Fellow« is made possible as part of the Weltoffenes Berlin fellowship program of the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.