Lost location and found scores. How the Lviv Organ Hall converts numbers into creativity and promotes ecological art – Publications

This is the story of the transformation from Cinderella to Princess of an important institution of classical music – the Lviv Organ Hall. Shortly before the full-scale invasion, its premises were renovated and martial law did not stop the development. Currently, world and all-Ukrainian premieres, art exhibitions, expositions of musical instruments take place in the renovated Organ Hall, and the concert hall is sold out almost every day, including for foreign performers.

On February 18, the world premiere of the “Peremozhna” symphony by a modern Ukrainian composer will take place here Zoltana Almashi. It will be performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Luhansk Philharmonic Orchestra Ivan Ostapovich.

What makes this institution unique on the map of the City of the Lion – in the material of the music reviewer UP. Culture Natalki Pysankawho visited the Lviv Organ Hall and talked with its directors Ivan Ostapovich and Taras Demko.

Creative processes are boiling here every day: posters for future concerts are discussed, promotional videos are recorded to invite visitors to concerts and exhibitions, statistical data about Organny’s work are displayed and analyzed on the big screen in order to better understand the visitor and improve communication with him. And there is always music: rehearsals, daytime concerts, evening concerts, candlelight concerts… Subsequently, selected music by Ukrainian composers is recorded and replenishes the Ukrainian Live Classic resource.

Just glancing at the poster for February 2024, we see the names of invited foreign artists who during the war were not afraid to come to Ukraine to perform at the Lviv Organ: Japanese conductor Takuya Shigeshita, Swedish conductor Daniel Hansson, Polish organist Yaroslav Wrublevsky.

And the central event of the month will be the world premiere of the “Peremozhna” symphony by modern Ukrainian composer Zoltan Almasha, commissioned by the Lviv Organ Hall. On February 18, it will be performed by the Luhansk Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Ivan Ostapovich.

10 years ago, this institution was not very visible in the cultural life of Lviv. The revitalization of the Lviv Organ began when Ivan Ostapovych and Taras Demko became its directors in 2017. Then they faced many challenges, one of them, if not the primary one, was to overcome the prejudiced attitude towards the concert hall as something conservative, intended for a limited circle of listeners.

“These are all patterns that immediately become obsolete when you express them. I don’t see any stereotype that can work here.” Taras Demko is confident.

At Organny, they work a lot with statistics, analyzing concert attendance, video viewing, music listening in the application. It’s not just a love of numbers, plates are boredom that helps to develop, they say here.

The organ hall is a place of transition from the material world to the immaterial and back. The frescoes, which were once hidden under plaster, were revealed during the renovation. They are as accessible as musical works of forgotten Ukrainian composers. They are extracted from the archives and returned to the stage.

Organny bets on multidisciplinarity. When visiting it, listeners of classical music first enter the art gallery. Organ Hall Gallery was opened on December 30, 2018, and a new exhibition is opened every month. There was a non-trivial exhibition of butterflies, and a striking exhibition of paintings by Mariupol residents “Home”.

“These snow-white walls seem to have been created for paintings. Each canvas is perceived individually, the arches and niches seem to isolate each painting, this is the great advantage of our gallery: there is only you, the canvas and free space.”– this is how Taras Demko poetically describes the Lviv organ gallery.

Along with the paintings, we can see an exhibition of rare grand pianos and pianos (currently there are 11 of them), some of which serve not just as decoration, but are played at chamber music concerts. And finally, the luxurious organ, manufactured by the Gebrüder Rieger organ building company, was inaugurated on June 5, 1933, and restored in 1968. During its more than 90-year history, it has preserved its unique voice and still captivates listeners with its powerful sound.

The Lviv Organ Hall is the founder of the all-Ukrainian strategy for the promotion of Ukrainian music Ukrainian Live. It was launched in 2019. Already in October 2020, the application with Ukrainian classics was launched Ukrainian Live Classic (ULC)created in order for Ukrainian music to be heard all over the world.

By the way, the application is free, does not contain advertising and is available for download on the Google Play Market and the Apple Store. Here you can listen to the works of Ukrainian composers from the 17th to the 21st century. At the end of 2023, the application included more than 250 albums by 107 Ukrainian composers. Information about the artists is presented with beautifully designed pictures, in Ukrainian and English. There are musicological annotations to the albums: about the performance, the music itself, the time, the context…

“Are we in the organ hall or are we IT experts in some startup?” – Taras Demko recalls the process of creating the Ukrainian Live Classic application.

Undoubtedly, the application does not contain all the works of Ukrainian composers, only representative ones formed into albums. Work on filling continues every week. The goal of the project is to present Ukrainian music comprehensively, to show that it is part of the European context.

Completing the ULC application requires working with music archives of long-term research, editing scores. He has been doing this for many years Ivan Ostapovich – conductor, musicologist, composer. He shares his thoughts about Ukrainian music in the world context:

“There is still an opinion that there is art of a high, medium standard and popular music. But if we apply this scheme to the history of our Ukrainian music, it doesn’t work, because we don’t know a lot. Here, for example: what was written in Kyiv (Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa) in the middle of the 19th century? It’s like there’s something in the encyclopedia, but no one has any idea what it should sound like (unlike Beethoven’s 9th symphony).

Therefore, first of all, it should be brought to the surface, performed and recorded. We have heard about Stefania Turkevich, but who performed her works? We do this so that future generations have something to lean on. And if many people did this, we could look at our musical culture differently.”

A significant part of the music from the ULC application was recorded in the Lviv organ. Here you will see names that you have hardly heard of before, for example, a composer of the 20th century Yaroslav Vereshchagin. Or you will find “unexpected” works by famous composers – a piano concerto by Verikyvskyi, known mostly for his choral works, is being prepared for performance.

Incredible stories are associated with some works. Pianist Roman Repka once accidentally found the score of Mykola Dremliuga’s piano concerto, studied the notes, played with the Luhansk Philharmonic Orchestra, and now you can listen to this recording in the app.

With the beginning of a full-scale invasion in the musical sphere, there were many requests from foreign groups who wanted to perform Ukrainian music as a sign of support, so the project received another direction of development – Ukrainian Scores. This is the largest database of Ukrainian classical music (which is important: with preservation of copyrights to works). Today, it contains more than 3,500 works by Ukrainian composers in various genres, styles and eras – from the Renaissance to modern music.

More than 2,000 applications from all over the world for notes by Ukrainian composers have been fulfilled. Ukrainian music has already been performed live according to notes from Ukrainian Scores in the USA, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Australia and many other countries. The Lviv Organ together with the Ukrainian Institute and the Lyatoshyn Club united and collected sheet music for several months, divided them into genres so that foreigners could work with the material conveniently.

One may get the impression that exclusively Ukrainian music is heard in the Lviv organ. The statistics of one autumn month of 2023 recorded: Johann Sebastian Bach was played the most in the Organ (more than 25% of the total time).

Although the emphasis is on the performance of Ukrainian music, and even more so – little-known Ukrainian music. Have you heard about Mykhailo Verbytskyi’s co-play “The Highlanders”? Or about the mini-opera about the totalitarian regime “Zorya” by the exiled composer Ihor Sonevytskyi? Do you know about the composer from Galicia Stefania Turkevich and her works? – The music of these composers was played and recorded in the Lviv organ.

The Lviv organ, among other things, supports forced migrants and welcomes residents of Bakhmut, Starobilsk and other temporarily occupied cities to its concerts. And the Luhansk Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra is currently one of the key components of Organny’s team. The collective collects sold-out tickets and has the opportunity to tour abroad.

According to Taras Demko, the Lviv Organ Hall likes to ask questions and find answers. For example, in what way should you attract young and very young audiences. Currently, there are several programs, including “unlimited adults”, when only a ticket for a child is paid and he can bring as many adults with him as he wants. Or unlimited children brought by adults.

By the way, one of the children’s events took place during the interview. So it was quite noisy and fun here, children freely moved around the halls and even played musical instruments.

An ecological approach is also implemented here: can our concert hall reduce the amount of garbage, in particular, mental garbage, without cluttering our guests with spam and without cluttering the environment with tons of paper from programs? – As a solution: to encourage visitors to view electronic programs, not to overload them with information from presenters during the concert.

Taras Demko shares the concept of the future Lviv organ hall:

“Every little thing will form a clear association in a person with the fact that he enters a place of culture, connected with traditions, with past experience. And so we will gather people who think about the future, who build, construct, invent, connect to something innovative and progressive in order to transfer something to the future. That’s what I want Organny to be about!”