Have we forgotten Ukraine?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Have we forgotten Ukraine?
Not if I have anything to do with it.
I’ve been listening to the violin sonatas of Valentin Bibik, a much-neglected composer who spent much of his career teaching at the Conservatoire in Kharkiv, a marginal figure in a borderline country…
En francais ici.
“Have we forgotten Ukraine?”
The answer is, sadly, yes.
“Have we forgotten Ukraine?”
The answer is, sadly, yes.
Are you still pretending you don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine? Ukraine uses a lot of the same tactics as Hamas. They learned them from a lot of the same people.
Regardless of which “people” you have in mind, we do know that “tactics” used by Hamas are so uniquely monstrous that no one – not even brutally murderous Russians, let alone Ukrainians defending their country – comes close.
War is the enemy of culture, and this war was entirely avoidable. Our leaders on both sides are fools.
Thanks for the introduction to this very interesting composer.
Correction: Bibik was a Soviet composer. He only spent 3 years in the independent Ukraine and in 1994 moved to St Petersburg, Russia, then in 1998 to Israel, where he died in 2003. The attempts to declare every artist born within the borders of 1991 Ukraine as a “Ukrainian” are just pathetic. Like they did to Ivan Aivazovsky, an Armenian born in Russian Crimea in 1817, who became a famous painter. At the same time, Zelensky’s regime is doing it’s best to erase all memory of Mikhail Bulgakov, a writer who was born in Kiev but openly despised Ukrainian nationalism.