Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra

Alemdar Karamanov was described by his colleague Alfred Schnittke as a “phenomenally talented” composer, who consistently resisted official strictures, for example when, in the middle of the Cold War, he produced his 17th Symphony entitled “America” – a name that hardly promised success in Soviet Union. At a time when priests were being deported to labour camps and lunatic asylums, he continued to write religious works such as his Third Piano Concerto “Ave Maria”, whose orientalism touches forge links to Biblical stories such as the flight from Egypt: “religion and religious texts have become a consistent source of my works”. Accompanied by the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra directed by its Principal Conductor Hobart Earle, Tamara Stefanovich plays this rarely performed concerto in Berlin, which Karamanov compared to the “ancient Egyptian ritual of the rain dance.” There is also a chance to hear the first movement of the Hutsul Triptych by Myroslav Skoryk, which is based on Carpathian-Ukrainian folk music. Here Skoryk drew on his score for Sergej Paradjanov’s award-winning film drama “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”. The programme continues with Mykola Lysenko’s Elegy op. 41, Nr. 3, a true classic of the Ukrainian piano repertoire, heard here in a dazzling, multi-coloured new orchestral version. To this day Lysenko is regarded in his homeland as the founder of a distinctive national style of music – something that can also be said of Jean Sibelius, who discovered an idiom in his Second Symphony that the Finnish press identified at the time as uniquely “Finnish”.