Ukrainian Jewish Heritage: A chat with opera star Pavlo Hunka - Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio

British-Ukrainian opera star Pavlo Hunka is the Director of a classical concert to be held on September 29, 2016 at the Opera House in Kyiv.
The concert is part of the 75th Anniversary commemoration of the Babyn Yar tragedy, sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter of Toronto.

In 1941, the Nazis murdered some 150,000 people, including over 32,000 Jews. The massacre at Babyn Yar is considered one of the most heinous atrocities of the Holocaust, and has come to symbolize Nazi brutality.

This commemorative concert will feature classical musicians from Ukraine, Israel, Canada and Great Britain, and a symphony orchestra from Germany. The conductor of the orchestra will be Oksana Lyniv of Ukraine.

The concert will include a cameo performance by Mr. Hunka, who took time from his hectic schedule of rehearsals for an interview on Nash Holos.

We spoke about the upcoming concert, his career, and his Ukrainian Art Song project, showcasing Ukrainian classical music.

Pawlina: The 75th anniversary of the [foreign] tragedy will be commemorated in K of this fall. Late September to be exact. One of the events will be a concert which you are organizing and producing. How did you come to be the orchestrator so to speak of this event?

Pavlo Hunka: I was approached by members of the board of the Ukrainian Jewish encounter to see whether I could pull together a program first and foremost and then I suggested to them that as I had access to pretty well all of the great musicians of the world because I worked with many of them. Maybe we could pull together a fantastic cast and they gave me the opportunity to approach some big orchestras for example. Not just to use Ukrainian strengths, and to cut a long story short, we have engaged the Hamburg symphony orchestra to go to Ukraine for the 29th of September when the concert will be. Together we've the soloist, that's Benjamin Butterfield, who's from your neck of the woods, he's from Victoria and I asked Ben because he sings the Ukrainian so wonderfully. He’s part of the Ukrainian Art Song project. And then there's Gwal James, she's Israeli, living in Berlin to sing and then myself as well. Conductor will be Oksana Lyniv, she's a young Ukrainian conductor from Western Ukraine, who is now deputy artistic director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, in Germany. And finally, the Dumka national chorus. We thought that we did include one element of a big Ukrainian group if you like particularly because I choose as a second piece of the concert, Yevhen Stankovych’s Kaddish-Requiem. The program opens up with Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei”, which is like an evening prayer at Yom Kippur New Year Jewish prayer and then it goes into the Kaddish-Requiem by Yevhen Stankovych, which is a contemporary piece, which tells the story of Babyn Yar. I chose it because it's not really a requiem, it's really just a sort of statement or fact if you like. And then that takes us to the interval and after the interval is a Brahms requiem, which is also not really a requiem, it's a spiritual work, which doesn't really talk about any particular faith but it talks really about spirituality. So it's sort of a journey from prayer to fact, to hope and I thought that was so it would be sort of quite appropriate to choice that type of program, which it moves into the positive.

Pawlina: Yes that's what this whole commemoration event is all about, isn't it, it's to acknowledge and commemorate the past but there is so much good stuff that's going on in Ukraine right now in particular with Ukrainian Jewish encounter. You had a long and successful career as an opera singer. This project is casting you in a different role kind of behind the scenes, or you said you will be singing as well?

Pavlo Hunka: Yeah well I've done, on a smaller scale I've done things like this over some years in the sense that I finally...

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