The project was created as part of the V Literary and Translation Festival TRANSLATORIUM that took place on October 1-3, 2021. Its idea arose from the intent to show the literary work through the lens of classical music, make an intersemiotic translation of the artwork to discover new meanings, bring new focuses, and look at this work in a new way with another medium.
The novel Amadoka by Sofia Andrukhovych, published by the Old Lion Publishing House in 2020, immediately attracted attention both with its form and its content. The plot covers three painful periods of Ukrainian history, shown through the detailed web of human destinies against the background of the hypothesis of the existence of the Amadoka Lake, which is skillfully wrapped in the metaphor of memory and its loss. Kyiv today, Buchach during World War II, and Kyiv during Stalin’s repressions: Romana, an archivist, tries to restore the memory of the anti-terrorist operation soldier Bohdan by telling him the stories from his family’s life; Uliana, a nurse, saves Pinkhas from the persecution of Jews and seeks a safe and unknown hiding place for him; Mykola Zerov’s wife Sofia falls in love with their family friend Viktor Petrov during the period of exile of the Ukrainian intellectuals. Amadoka, Europe’s largest lake recorded on medieval maps, disappears without a trace. Is the loss of stories of people and phenomena, the loss of knowledge and memory, a natural or accidental process? This thick and multi-layered text, which speaks of reality in artistic language, leaves a mighty and indescribable impression, as it touches on very complex sensory topics that cannot be described in words. And when one runs out of words, it’s time for more abstract forms of communication, such as music.
The project involved three Ukrainian composers: Boris Loginov, Maxim Kolomiiets, and Albert Saprykin. Each of them worked separately on one of the three historical periods described in the novel, but also worked together, given the unity of the text, in order to create a coherent musical narrative.
The concert included three indivisible parts:
Sofia — performed by Orest Smovzh (violin), and composed by Albert Saprykin. Here you can listen to a fragment of the piece:
Uliana — performed by Olena Antonik (piano), Orest Smovzh (violin), Elza Zherebchuk (voice), and Mariia Khylko (organ); composed by Boris Loginov. Here you can listen to a fragment of the piece:
Romana — performed by Mariia Khylko (organ), Olena Antonik (piano), Nazar Stets (double bass), Yuriy Nemirovskyi (clarinet), Orest Smovzh (violin), and Elza Zherebchuk (voice); composed by Maxim Kolomiiets. Here you can listen to a fragment of the piece:
The premiere of the concert took place at the Khmelnytskyi Regional Philharmonic with the support of the European Union, the International Renaissance Foundation in the framework of the joint initiative EU4USociety, and the Old Lion Publishing House.
The media partner of the project is Suspilne Podillya.
On The Claquers, you can read interviews with composers about the project.
On the Suspilne Podillya channel, you can watch the full video of the concert.