Ukrainian Mixtape

The Ukrainian-born conductor unearths beautiful and astonishing works by four great Ukrainian composers deserving worldwide celebration. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine proved a powerful catalyst for this album. But as conductor Dalia Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical, she’d conceived its basic outline a decade earlier. Despite being born in Ukraine herself, and having a Ukrainian father, Stasevska left Ukraine with her family in early childhood and so scarcely knew any of the country’s classical music, let alone heard it performed anywhere. With the Russian attack, “something moved in my heart,” Stasevska recalls. “I felt that somehow I needed to help Ukrainian culture to survive. Of course, I know Ukrainian history really well through stories told by my father and grandmother, and how its people have been oppressed by Russia for 350 years. But now, witnessing this actually happen, I realised how deeply rooted it all is.” Soon after finishing her 2024 album Dalia’s Mixtape, recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it occurred to Stasevska that the mixtape concept—presenting short pieces that are easy to playlist—would be an effective way of promoting Ukrainian classical music. Finding enough suitable music from Ukraine’s past, mostly written under Russian subjugation, proved a mammoth task since much of the repertoire had never been published and remained in manuscript. With the help of some friends at the INSO-Lviv Orchestra, Stasevska contacted a musicologist able to compile a list of dozens of composers and all the music available by them. “It took me well over a year to go through all the material,” says Stasevska. Works by four composers excited her interest. Least familiar of these is Levko Kolodub (1930-2019), whose sparkling and rather misleadingly titled Solemn Overture provides a cracking opener for the album. “I’m so happy to have found this piece,” enthuses Stasevska; “I had always wanted to find pieces that are inspiring to programme. And what a concert opener it is!” The other “unknown” composer is Fedir Yakymenko (1876-1945), generally only known—under the Russified spelling Akimenko—as Stravinsky’s first teacher of harmony. Yet the two Yakymenko works lovingly performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra are real finds. Stasevska recalls the excitement of her first read-through of his music at the piano, particularly a Nocturne for strings composed in 1913. “There’s a particular sensitivity and lightness in that work,” she says. “Yakymenko was already clearly rooted in Impressionism, so it makes total sense that he later went to Paris. In his other work on the album, Angel, you can ‘see’ these Impressionist paintings with its use of colour and light. It has a sensuality, yet there’s also a little bit of Ukrainian meatiness in it—a sense of having his Slavic feet grounded on black soil.” Of the two better-known composers, Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), Ukraine’s great late-19th century nationalist composer, is top of the bill with the stirring overture to his opera Taras Bulba. “Gogol’s Taras Bulba is a really key story in the Ukrainians’ nationalistic sense of who we are as a nation,” says Stasevka, “our roots, our traditions, what makes us unique.” But the album’s soul, insists Stasevska, is the tone poem Grazhyna by Borys Lyatoshynsky (1896-1968). “It’s one of the most glorious tone poems I’ve ever conducted,” she enthuses, “worthy of comparison with those of Richard Strauss and Sibelius.” For Ukrainians, Lyatoshynsky was one of their most seminal figures of 20th-century music. “He really renewed the language of Ukrainian music,” Stasevska explains. Lyatoshynsky achieved this both as a composer and as a teacher—his pupils included Ukraine’s leading contemporary composer, Valentin Silvestrov. Based on a poem about the heroic wife of a Lithuanian prince by the Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz, Grazhyna’s narrative may appear a little distant from Ukrainian history and culture. Stasevska suggests this might have been a deliberate ploy: “It seems to me Lyatoshynsky chose this subject—set so far away both historically and geographically—for a reason. In his time Ukrainians couldn’t celebrate their own past and culture, or act how they wanted. In this story, the princess has to perform her deeds in disguise—incognito. So you can think about it as a metaphor: Lyatoshynsky had to hide himself, but he wanted to celebrate those brave Ukrainians who in their heart were fighting for freedom and for the truth.”