It should not be forgotten!
The National Opera will host the Ukrainian premiere of Virko Baley’s opera Holodomor: Red Earth. The composer told The Day he thought about the performance for three decades
Let us recall that Kyivan audience had a chance to listen in October 2012 to a concert featuring excerpts from this work of the famous Ukrainian-born American composer. Virko Baley, renowned as composer, pianist, conductor and professor at the Conservatory of the University of Nevada, visited the capital in person then. The New York-based poet Bohdan Boychuk wrote libretto for Holodomor. On that earlier occasion, soprano from Kyiv Tamara Khodakova and American tenor John Dykers sang the major parts, Woman and Man, respectively. The 2012 performance included the introduction to the opera (the instrumental part) as well as “Lullaby,” “The Time of the Wolf” and “Eternal Shining.” The singers were accompanied by symphony orchestra of the National Philharmonic Society of Ukraine, conducted by Vitalii Protasov.
Baley’s opera premiered in Las Vegas and New York in early 2013, with the complete version coming to Ukrainian audience for the first time on November 21.
Let us recall that The Day’s No. 68, November 8, 2012 featured an interview with the composer with the latter revealing his almost three decades-long effort to stage the opera.
“I really liked Boychuk’s play Hunger and saw it as a good opera material,” Baley confessed. “There are only two main characters in it, Man and Woman, no crowd scenes, and this is practically important, because America is short on professional opera companies capable of staging a major contemporary opera. It requires a budget running to around half a million dollars, a lot of money that cannot be recovered from ticket sales. In the early 1990s, the theater department at the University of Las Vegas where I teach decided to stage my opera, and it was to be directed by Yurii Illienko. However, nothing came out of that project, forcing the university to abandon it.
It is the story of three hungry people: a peasant woman with a baby and a former functionary, who had participated in the dekulakization and became an embittered man who gradually repents of his crimes. They meet by chance, being people of contrasting ideologies and temperament, and we show their emotional lives and look into the characters’ inner world, showing the development of their relationship under extreme conditions. Through their fates, the audience gets to see the entire horror of the Holodomor…”
By the way, Hunger, the drama on which the opera is based, written in America back in 1962 by the modernist poet and writer Boychuk, was first published in the collection Holodomor: Two Plays by Smoloskyp Publishers of Kyiv in 2008.
The famous American tenor John Dykers will sing the part of Man. This will be the singer’s second visit to our capital. The Kyiv performance will involve four more singers. Some scenes in the opera will feature ballet, mime and orchestra. A plenty of multimedia elements will be used, too, including excerpts from popular films of the 1930s, newsreels, radio recordings and authentic music of the time, quotes from speeches of Soviet leaders, etc.
The event’s organizers are the Civic Committee for Commemoration of the Holodomor Victims, holding it as part of the 80th anniversary of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33.
