The Kyiv Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1979. Since then, it has performed at major European concert halls such as the Berliner Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Cité de la musique in Paris and Warsaw Philharmonic. Under its artistic director Luigi Gaggero, the orchestra offers an interesting selection of representative works from several epochs in Ukrainian music history: Freaqsuence by Kyiv-born Alisa Zaika, currently studying in London, a Symphonic Poem by Yevhen Stankovych (b. 1942) and the Fifth Symphony by the nineteenth- century Ukrainian composer Mykhaylo Verbytskyi. The programme of this concert also includes the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La forza del destino, from 1862, Witold Lutosławski’s two-part Mi-parti, from 1976, regarded as a prime example of the Polish composer’s original chain technique, and also Béla Bartók’s Four Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 12 – an exceptional example in the composer’s oeuvre of a departure from the idiom of Hungarian folk music. The central point of the evening will be a performance by Olha Stukalova, a regular soloist of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Second Flute Concerto in D major.

Jan Lech