Myroslav Skoryk

The Ukrainian composer, pianist, musicologist and teacher Myroslav Skoryk was born in 1938 in the then Soviet city of Lwów (Lviv). He attended the Academy of Music there from 1945 until his family was banished to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. Skoryk was only permitted to return to Lviv in 1955. Until 1960 he studied Composition with Stanislav Liudkevych and Adam Soltys at Lviv Conservatoire, which is now known as the Lysenko Academy of Music. From there he went on to the Moscow Conservatoire where he took his Doctorate with Dmitri Kabalevski. Skoryk then became a lecturer in Composition at Lviv Conservatoire and at the Kyiv Academy of Music, where he was promoted to Professor in 1984. In 1987 he also became a Professor at Lviv Conservatoire where he chaired the Department of Composition. His students have included such prominent figures as Yevhen Stankovych, Ivan Karabyts, Oleh Kyva, Vadim Ilyin and Osvaldas Balakauskas. Skoryk was Secretary of the Union of Ukrainian Composers and was elected Director of its branch in Lviv in 1988. He is a winner of the distinguished Shevchenko Prize and in 1995 he was awarded the title “People’s Artist of Ukraine”. In spring 2011 he was appointed Artistic Director of the National Opera in Kyiv. Skoryk’s multi-faceted composing oeuvre includes the two-act opera Moisei (Moses), whose world premiere received financial support from the Vatican, numerous concertos (including nine violin concertos) vocal works and music for theatre and films. From the mid-1960s onwards, the composer was an adherent of the so-called “new folklorism” in Ukraine, which used ethnographic sources as the basis of a new national artistic movement, until he adopted a postmodern style.