Da Vinci Classics
Valentina Antonyuk, Valeriy Antonyuk, Myroslav Skoryk, Vladimir Sheiko, Victoria Zhadko, Natalia Ponomarchuk, Academic Symphony Orchestra of National Philharmonic of Ukraine, National Radio Company of Ukraine Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
15.14€
Valeriy Antonyuk · Symphonies & Other Works Vol. 1 · 7 tracks
Two CDs. Track timings follow Deezer, Spotify and TIDAL; work titles and performers follow the original booklet.
The Academic Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine was established in Kyiv in 1995 at the initiative of Dmytro Ostapenko. Its early conductors included L. Tykhonov and Mykola Diadiura; Roman Kofman later served as principal conductor. Based at the National Philharmonic, the ensemble forms an important part of its concert life and performs symphonic repertoire with Ukrainian and international artists.
On this recording, the orchestra performs Valeriy Antonyuk’s Symphony No. 1, Harmony of Motion, conducted by Myroslav Skoryk.
Myroslav Skoryk (1938–2020) was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and musicologist. Born in Lviv, he studied at the Lviv Conservatory and continued his training with Dmitry Kabalevsky in Moscow. His output spans opera, ballet, orchestral and chamber music, instrumental concertos and piano works. The opera Moses and the widely performed Melody are among his best-known compositions.
On this album, Skoryk conducts the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine in Valeriy Antonyuk’s Symphony No. 1, Harmony of Motion.
Natalia Ponomarchuk is a Ukrainian conductor and a graduate of the National Music Academy of Ukraine, where she studied with Allin Vlasenko. Her appointments have included leadership of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Dnipro Philharmonic, and conducting positions with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, Kyiv Camerata and Ukrainian National Radio. She became chief conductor of the Kyiv Chamber Orchestra of the National Philharmonic in 2018.
A committed advocate of Ukrainian repertoire, she conducts Antonyuk’s Symphony No. 3 and Lorca cantata on this recording.
The National Radio Company of Ukraine Symphony Orchestra, also known as the Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra, was founded in 1929. Its concerts, broadcasts and extensive recording activity have contributed to the national musical archive, documenting Ukrainian works alongside the international repertoire and music for film. Volodymyr Sheiko became its chief conductor and artistic director in 2005.
On this recording it performs Valeriy Antonyuk’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 and Pushkin cantata under Vladimir Sheiko, and the Piano Concerto under Victoria Zhadko.
The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine was founded in November 1918, with Oleksandr Horily as its first conductor. Its history includes the leadership of Natan Rachlin, Stefan Turchak, Volodymyr Kozhukhar, Fedir Hlushchenko, Igor Blazhkov and Theodore Kuchar. The orchestra has played a major role in performing and recording Ukrainian symphonic music alongside the international repertoire.
On this album it performs Valeriy Antonyuk’s Symphony No. 3, Predictable Music, and his cantata on poems by Federico García Lorca, conducted by Natalia Ponomarchuk.
Valentina Antonyuk is a Ukrainian lyric-dramatic soprano, vocal teacher and professor at the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine. An Honoured Artist of Ukraine, she has premiered and championed the vocal works of her son, composer Valeriy Antonyuk. His cantatas on poems by Federico García Lorca and Alexander Pushkin were written specifically for her voice and its distinctive timbre.
Alongside her performing and teaching career, she is a poet, prose writer, art critic and scholar with a doctorate in cultural studies. Her research includes the linguistic and cultural foundations of solo singing.
Valeriy Antonyuk was born in Ukraine in 1979. A composer, arranger, pianist and songwriter, he works across classical and popular music and plays Ukrainian flutes, cimbalom, classical and electric guitar, drums and bass guitar. He began studying piano at five and started composing at twelve. His early works included five piano preludes entitled Imitating Prokofiev, the solo-flute sonata Dedication to Debussy, three arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs for unaccompanied mixed choir and a string-quartet Nocturne in memory of Gustav Mahler.
From 1993 to 1997 he received composition lessons from Vitaliy Kireyko, composer of the opera Forest Song and ballet Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. In 1998 he entered the composition and orchestration department of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine. He graduated in 2003 after studying twentieth-century compositional techniques, counterpoint and orchestration with Gennadiy Lyashenko and piano with Yuriy Gluschenko.
His graduation work, The Sounding Is Present, is a twenty-minute piece for full symphony orchestra, performed in the National Radio Company of Ukraine’s Grand Recording Studio by its orchestra under Vyacheslav Blinov. Yevhen Stankovych, then head of the composition department, praised its individuality, orchestration and formal boldness. Antonyuk continued postgraduate studies at the same academy with Lyashenko from 2004 to 2008.
His screen work includes music for the television films Red Lotus, Bread Day and Snake Is Creeping, produced by Star Media/Freshproduction.ua; the documentary Black Sea Navy 1941–1944, produced by Insitemedia; and the short films Who Is Tanya? and She Called Him an Idiot. His music has featured at Ukrainian contemporary-music festivals including Kyiv Music Fest, Musical Premieres of the Season and Contrasts.
The Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra has recorded his music for the national broadcasting archive. These recordings include his cantata on poems by Federico García Lorca, the Piano Concerto (2007) and Four Songs on poems by Vasyl Stus (2008), in performances conducted by Victoria Zhadko. His cantata on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Symphony No. 2, Fanfare, were recorded in 2011 and 2012 respectively under Vladimir Sheiko.
His collaborators have included the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine with Vladimir Sirenko and Natalia Ponomarchuk; the Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine with Myroslav Skoryk; the State Academic Variety-Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine with Mykola Lysenko; the Bulgarian Film Orchestra with Gregor Narholz; and the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra with Nikoloz Rachveli. He has also worked with the Archi and Collegium string quartets, the Credo Chamber Choir under Bogdan Plish, the Khreshchatyk Academic Chamber Choir under Pavlo Struts and Italian bass clarinetist Fabrizio Bardelli. His mother, lyric-dramatic soprano and professor Valentina Antonyuk, has premiered and championed his vocal music.
By the time of this album’s publication in 2018, his output encompassed around 600 symphonic, choral and chamber works, pieces for instrumental ensembles and orchestral miniatures, as well as approximately thirty songs setting his own Ukrainian and Russian lyrics in styles including rock, pop-rock and Britpop.
He joined the National Union of Composers of Ukraine in 2004, BMI in 2008 and MCPS in 2009. He won the International Prokofiev Composers’ Competition in Ukraine in 2000 with Theme and Six Transformations for Piano Quintet, and the Grand Prize in the music-for-film competition Solospiv at the eighth Kyiv International Documentary Film Festival, Kinolitopys, in 2009. His honours include the Levko Revutsky Award (2010) and the Borys Lyatoshynsky Award (2018) for Symphony No. 7, Masquerade of Unseen Dreams, dedicated to innocent victims of war and terror.
Victoria Zhadko is a Ukrainian opera and symphonic conductor whose career also encompasses classical guitar and teaching. She has collaborated with ensembles of the National Radio Company of Ukraine, the National Opera of Ukraine, Kyiv Camerata, Kyiv Soloists and the National Academic Wind Orchestra of Ukraine, and has appeared at international festivals. Her recordings are represented in the Ukrainian Radio archive.
On this album she conducts the National Radio Company of Ukraine Symphony Orchestra in Valeriy Antonyuk’s Piano Concerto, with the composer as soloist.
Vladimir Sheiko, also known as Volodymyr Sheiko, is a Ukrainian conductor from Kharkiv. He graduated from the Kyiv Conservatory in opera-symphonic and choral conducting in 1988 and subsequently undertook advanced training at the Bolshoi Theatre. He founded the Ukraine Symphony Orchestra in 1990 and became chief conductor of the Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2005. His work has included opera and operetta productions, international touring, broadcast projects and recordings for Ukraine’s national radio archive.
On this album he conducts Antonyuk’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 and the cantata on poems by Alexander Pushkin.
Valeriy Antonyuk was born in Ukraine in 1979. A composer, arranger, pianist and songwriter, he works across classical and popular music and plays Ukrainian flutes, cimbalom, classical and electric guitar, drums and bass guitar. He began studying piano at five and started composing at twelve. His early works included five piano preludes entitled Imitating Prokofiev, the solo-flute sonata Dedication to Debussy, three arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs for unaccompanied mixed choir and a string-quartet Nocturne in memory of Gustav Mahler.
From 1993 to 1997 he received composition lessons from Vitaliy Kireyko, composer of the opera Forest Song and ballet Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. In 1998 he entered the composition and orchestration department of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine. He graduated in 2003 after studying twentieth-century compositional techniques, counterpoint and orchestration with Gennadiy Lyashenko and piano with Yuriy Gluschenko.
His graduation work, The Sounding Is Present, is a twenty-minute piece for full symphony orchestra, performed in the National Radio Company of Ukraine’s Grand Recording Studio by its orchestra under Vyacheslav Blinov. Yevhen Stankovych, then head of the composition department, praised its individuality, orchestration and formal boldness. Antonyuk continued postgraduate studies at the same academy with Lyashenko from 2004 to 2008.
His screen work includes music for the television films Red Lotus, Bread Day and Snake Is Creeping, produced by Star Media/Freshproduction.ua; the documentary Black Sea Navy 1941–1944, produced by Insitemedia; and the short films Who Is Tanya? and She Called Him an Idiot. His music has featured at Ukrainian contemporary-music festivals including Kyiv Music Fest, Musical Premieres of the Season and Contrasts.
The Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra has recorded his music for the national broadcasting archive. These recordings include his cantata on poems by Federico García Lorca, the Piano Concerto (2007) and Four Songs on poems by Vasyl Stus (2008), in performances conducted by Victoria Zhadko. His cantata on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Symphony No. 2, Fanfare, were recorded in 2011 and 2012 respectively under Vladimir Sheiko.
His collaborators have included the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine with Vladimir Sirenko and Natalia Ponomarchuk; the Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine with Myroslav Skoryk; the State Academic Variety-Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine with Mykola Lysenko; the Bulgarian Film Orchestra with Gregor Narholz; and the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra with Nikoloz Rachveli. He has also worked with the Archi and Collegium string quartets, the Credo Chamber Choir under Bogdan Plish, the Khreshchatyk Academic Chamber Choir under Pavlo Struts and Italian bass clarinetist Fabrizio Bardelli. His mother, lyric-dramatic soprano and professor Valentina Antonyuk, has premiered and championed his vocal music.
By the time of this album’s publication in 2018, his output encompassed around 600 symphonic, choral and chamber works, pieces for instrumental ensembles and orchestral miniatures, as well as approximately thirty songs setting his own Ukrainian and Russian lyrics in styles including rock, pop-rock and Britpop.
He joined the National Union of Composers of Ukraine in 2004, BMI in 2008 and MCPS in 2009. He won the International Prokofiev Composers’ Competition in Ukraine in 2000 with Theme and Six Transformations for Piano Quintet, and the Grand Prize in the music-for-film competition Solospiv at the eighth Kyiv International Documentary Film Festival, Kinolitopys, in 2009. His honours include the Levko Revutsky Award (2010) and the Borys Lyatoshynsky Award (2018) for Symphony No. 7, Masquerade of Unseen Dreams, dedicated to innocent victims of war and terror.
Introduction What does it mean to compose a symphony today? Can a large-scale symphonic work still fulfil a social function beyond its artistic value? This first collection of orchestral music by Ukrainian composer Valeriy Antonyuk suggests that the answer is an emphatic yes. Each work tells a different story, leading the listener into a parallel world and offering a personal vision of what symphonic music might become for future generations. Within their compact yet monumental forms, the symphonies turn words into music, sounds into harmony and harmony into an epic…
What does it mean to compose a symphony today? Can a large-scale symphonic work still fulfil a social function beyond its artistic value? This first collection of orchestral music by Ukrainian composer Valeriy Antonyuk suggests that the answer is an emphatic yes.
Each work tells a different story, leading the listener into a parallel world and offering a personal vision of what symphonic music might become for future generations. Within their compact yet monumental forms, the symphonies turn words into music, sounds into harmony and harmony into an epic narrative that the listener experiences as emotion.
The brooding Piano Concerto and the two vocal-symphonic works inspired by the poetry of Lorca and Pushkin offer further insights into Antonyuk’s musical language. This is music prepared to engage with the great composers of the past while avoiding imitation, seeking its own place through the quality and individuality of its voice.
Introduction by Edmondo Filippini
I composed this work in March 2011. It presents a philosophical image of an ideal form of human existence: harmony through self-knowledge. In the faster sections, elements of minimalism combine with the rhythms of modern rock to create scenes of action, a sense of time running short and the desire to do everything before it is too late.
The slower passages create a feeling of balance and meditation, rising above everyday concerns to reconsider existence. The scherzo introduces an element of self-irony. In the finale, energy flows like a train gathering speed, expressing a belief in the power of life.
This symphony was written in February 2012. Its title expresses a central idea that can be heard throughout the work: a recurring leitmotif appearing in different forms. It emerges as an ominous alarm in the first section, as a grotesque image of bells in the second and within the Romantic sweep of human experience in the third, before becoming a festive, solemn call in the finale. Each section is a mosaic of the world, seen through a range of styles in which I try to remain true to my own outlook.
Composed in 2007, the concerto has a cinematic character that invites associations with many different images: disaster, tragedy, love, death, faith in God and, ultimately, the desire to live.
In the faster passages, musical thought develops sequentially while retaining an elusive, unpredictable mood. Fleeting moments and the principle of variation coexist in its development. The concerto is conceived in three parts: an atmosphere of prayer in the introduction, with recitative-like rhythms in the exposition; solitude in the adagio; and a slow, luminous finale.
I wrote this symphony in just two weeks in April 2013. Its guiding principle is the instinctive, natural experience of listening. From the first notes to the final bars, the listener senses what is about to happen a split second before it arrives—hence the title, Predictable Music.
Musical thought develops sequentially. The melodic and harmonic structures evoke contemporary popular music, while the rhythmic patterns and methods of building climaxes draw on rock. Delicate, caressing slow themes express love and natural beauty. In the final section, a powerful flame of the universe appears, against which earthly life seems fleeting.
This work was composed in ten days in February 2014, in response to the killing of protesters in Kyiv during the events known as the Revolution of Dignity. The victims came to be remembered as the Heavenly Hundred. I could not watch what was happening in my city without tears.
The symphony evokes the events in Ukraine from November 2013 to the period of its composition. Its principal theme grows from the slogan “Glory to Ukraine—Glory to the Heroes!” Other themes recall the chants that resounded in Ukrainian squares and streets, and the confrontation between the people and the authorities. My challenge was to recreate these events through the timbres of a full symphony orchestra, taking the rhythm of the crowds as a basic musical inflection and shaping a musical image of the revolution.
This cantata was composed between 2007 and 2011 using the original Spanish texts. I sought to reflect the spirit of Lorca’s poetry through selections from different collections. The work opens with Y después from Poema del cante jondo, written in 1921 and published in 1931, and closes with El silencio from the same collection. Its five sections set Y después, Campana, Casida de la rosa, Madrigal and El silencio.
Each musical setting is closely connected to the vocal line. I wrote the work specifically for my mother, Valentina Antonyuk, and the distinctive timbre of her lyric-dramatic soprano. The orchestra develops or emphasises the verbal images suggested by the soprano. Working with the poetry of major writers is always rewarding: a composer must enter the poet’s inner world and find a new level of expression, particularly when writing for a single voice with a full symphony orchestra.
I wrote this work in Foros, on the Crimean Peninsula, over three weeks in June 2007. Conceived for my mother Valentina Antonyuk’s voice, it combines richly coloured orchestration with a soprano line that brings Pushkin’s verses to life. The four texts are Oh, How Many Wondrous Discoveries, When Roses Wither, Above Me in the Clear Azure and Impromptu on Ogareva.
Pushkin’s poetry lends itself naturally to music, making the composition of this cantata a particular pleasure. Images of nature’s grandeur, human loneliness, unrequited love and chance encounters unfold before the listener, revealing the unexpected and fortunate turns of life.
Programme notes by Valeriy Antonyuk
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Moving Classics TV
Antonyuk discusses his musical language and creative process, including Symphony No. 2 “Fanfare”, and presents this Da Vinci release of four symphonies, a piano concerto and two cantatas. A composer interview, not a rated album review.
Read the interview ↗ - Moving Classics TV
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