CODY ENGLANDER
Staff Writer
As a Ukrainian, the movements pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk will play tonight resonate with him now more than ever before.
“We seem to be repeating history as a human race,” Gavrylyuk said. “I’m talking generally, of course, but music is something that reminds us of the experiences before the second World War. There are so many similarities to the current situation in a flipped way, but generally, [the first movement of the sonata] is very symbolic of the suffering of the Ukrainian people.”
At 8 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, Gavrylyuk will perform a constructed piece about childlike innocence and war through pieces by Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Prokofiev and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The pieces work in tandem to cover a lifespan, from childhood to adulthood, crescendoing into a War Sonata by Prokofiev.
“He, of course, wrote this when the Nazis were invading Ukraine. Bizarrely, now it’s the Russians invading Ukraine, and now this music is more relevant to Ukrainians now more than anyone else,” Gavrylyuk said.
The composition ends in a more optimistic manner than it begins, with Gavrylyuk carrying an overall hopefulness for a positive resolution to war, as there was in World War II.
“The hope is still alive, and so the third moment climaxes in this glory of the human victory of the victory of the good side, so to speak; and so for me, this is a very personal kind of arc that I try to deal with, with this program,” Gavrylyuk said.
Bringing people together through the music he performs is imperative to Gavrylyuk’s performances, understanding people as people rather than categorized in particular groups of people.
“I strongly feel that I am against politicizing music, you know. So I’m playing plenty of Russian composers, because they play about universal ideas that can be now related to Ukraine,” Gavryluk said. “Who probably even imagined it would be conceptualized that way now, but it is relevant to what we’re living through, and it remains just as relevant as it was when it was written.”
“The first movements of the sonata inevitably connect to the suffering of the Ukrainian people for the last four or five years and the horrors that it brings,” Gavrylyuk said. “And then the resilience, the spirit of the human warmth in the second movement, the unstoppable kind of willpower of the third. We’re going to stand through this, we’re going to survive, our identity will survive through this.”
Gavrylyuk said music gives him hope for the world in times of war and suffering, believing in a world that can improve.
“Inevitably we all want a happy ending, no matter which background, no matter what our opinions are, no matter how strong our political views, we all want to live well,” Gavrylyuk said. “… Sometimes words are words, and it’s only frequencies that actually bring the real essence to the surface, and it touches us.”
