Victoria Vita Polevá

The Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Polevá represents a stylistic direction that is widely found across Eastern Europe, rejecting the avantgarde in favour of a revival of tonality and reconnecting with the expressive tools of Romanticism. Sonic beauty, the simplicity and clarity of musical ideas and immediate accessibility are the most significant characteristics of this neotonal music with which composers such as Arvo Pärt and, albeit from a very different geographical direction, John Taverner, can also be identified. Particular importance is attached to sacred music and religious subjects, forms of music that for a long time were scorned and proscribed in the Soviet Union. Since the Russian attack on Ukraine, Polevá’s works have explicitly referred to the war and the suffering it has caused in Ukraine.

Polevá was born in Kyiv in 1962 into a family with a lengthy musical tradition: her grandfather was a singer and her father a composer. Polevá studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in her native city with Ivan Karabits, amongst others, and held a series of teaching positions there between 1990 and 2005. She subsequently became a freelance artist and since April 2022 has lived in Switzerland.

Polevá began working as a composer by exploring avantgarde music before completing a stylistic shift towards neotonality and spirituality at the end of the 1990s. A large portion of her comprehensive oeuvre is devoted to choral music, both a capella and with orchestral accompaniment. She has also written symphonies and chamber music. Leading artists including the Kronos Quartet and, most notably, the violinist Gidon Kremer have championed her work in the West.

As of June 2023.