Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The kyiv Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its director, Luigi Gaggero, will close the 39th Canary Islands Music Festival with the work of Liatoschinski, “Peace defeats war”, a wish that all its musicians yearn for almost a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a press conference given by Gaggero at the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where he will offer this Thursday the first of the three concerts with which the festival concludes, the director explained the program that they will perform and has trusted that the “humanity with which the orchestra plays” is felt and that the “intensity of this tragedy has reinforced”.
“Feeling the humanity of the orchestra is more important than the repertoire” of the three famous Ukrainian musicians that the public will have the opportunity to hear, according to the headline of the orchestra, which will also offer a concert at the Fuerteventura Auditorium on Friday and at the from Tenerife on Saturday.
The first work on the program is Symphony No. 1 by Masksyme Berezovsky, a student of Father Martini, who was also Mozart’s teacher, it is a piece of “great freshness, like first love, different and never forgotten”, according to Gaggero.
He then indicated that they will perform Reinhold Glière’s Concerto for harp and orchestra, composed in 1938, and in which Catrin Mair Williams, a member of the Gran Canaria Philharmonic, will take part.
And to close the program, he has indicated that they have chosen the original work of Boris Liatoshinski, but with the first ending that the author wrote about peace, which he had to change due to Stalin’s wishes for a military march and that the musician did not return to listen, pointed out Gaggero, who pointed out that on the tour that began since the war began they have performed it twenty times.
The head of the kyiv Symphony since 2018 has commented that although the tragedy of the musicians is present, because every day and hour they receive news from their families about the bombings they have suffered or that they have had to leave their homes, play with them ” it is easy and difficult at the same time”, since, despite their situation, “they feel more than ever the need to be artists and an energy with which they make better music”.
Likewise, he has indicated that although they have had to establish their residence in Germany, from where they carry out their tours, he receives many messages from Ukraine, one of them an anonymous letter written from the trenches, where the person who wrote it, who does not know if he is still alive. , he told him after watching a video of the orchestra: “That is the reason why I am here.”
Gaggero has stated that since he gave his first concert ten years ago in kyiv, he was surprised by the quality of the public and the expectation that the music produced in the Ukrainians and understood the musician’s mission to contact life and death, “with what important”. “This tragic experience of the war has allowed me to understand the importance of classical music and its real need,” he said.
In addition, he has considered that musicians from the East understand and feel music differently; Westerners hide behind the mask of professionalism, but they play with “great intensity in every note”, something that fascinates him and that he has assured is even greater due to the war, Gaggero has highlighted.
The director has also revealed that he will never forget the first concert of the kyiv Symphony after the invasion, in Warsaw (Poland), because of the “humanity” it gave off.
The person in charge of the Festival, Jorge Perdigón, explained that since April 2022, when the “extraordinary” tour that the orchestra had undertaken became known, it was decided to invite it to the closing ceremony to contribute to the continuity of Ukrainian musical life at a particularly difficult time. difficult.
The concert has been sponsored by the Disa Foundation, whose director in the Canary Islands, Sara Matero, has stressed that in the face of the “barbarism of war” it is necessary to make visible the need for peace with “a tool as powerful as music” and He has wished the festival a long life, which, according to its director, concludes with a higher than expected influx of public and better than the years before the covid.
In the coming weeks he will already have the number of attendees, which he has predicted will be “very positive.” EFE