They were supposed to play in Ukraine at the Odessa Opera House, the one we see in war images surrounded by defensive sandbags. But the Berliner Philharmoniker necessarily had to move their annual concert for Europe in a short time to another place, in the Latvian town of Liepaja overlooking the Baltic Sea, in casual proximity to an anniversary of the small republic, which recently celebrated the thirty years of independence from the Soviet Union, after a peaceful revolution in the sign of choral singing with the music of that land.
Latvia, Odessa, Europe: a clear position also taken by their conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Russian from Siberia but who grew up artistically between Austria and Germany, in favor of Ukraine already in a chamber concert organized as a sign of solidarity by the German Federal President at the end of March in his Berlin residence at Bellevue Castle. Concert that caused a diplomatic wave with the Ukrainian ambassador in Germany due to the presence of only Russian and not Ukrainian interpreters, so much so that Petrenko, officially for health reasons, left the podium to his Japanese assistant Nodoka Okisawa at the last . And yet the music rang out in Bellevue and the figure of Valentin Silvestrov, the octogenarian Ukrainian composer who had to leave Kiev taking refuge in Berlin, appeared in the front row. His music, meditative, also resounded in the Liepaja concert hall, with the “Elegy” written starting from a sketch by his colleague and friend composer Ivan Karabits, in fact a concert for Ukraine opened by the commemoration of those who lost his life in the conflict through the «Painful Music» of the Latvian Peteris Vasks, written indeed for a family mourning but which has become the instrumental voice of a moving collective lament in the present time.
Europe as a plurality of freely cohabiting ethnic groups who know how to respect even those who live outside their borders: this is the sense of having planned Berio’s “Folk Songs”, an ecumene of popular songs from different nations transcribed and brought into the repertoire of cultured music, made even more cultured by the voice of the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča, presented in a yellow-blue dress, wrapped in the colors of Ukraine. And a Europe that chased away rulers and invaders of other people’s lands by recalling the events in music: the epic of Taras Bul’ba, the Ukrainian hero of Gogol’s tale, also eternalized by the symphonic rhapsody of the Moravian Janáček; the independenceist awakening of Finland against the Russians at the end of the nineteenth century, the substance of the homonymous symphonic poem by the national composer Sibelius. All this wanted to remember Petrenko with art, at the head of an orchestra like that of the Berliner which for years has been a group made up of instrumentalists of various origins, peacefully cohabiting in the sign of music.