Yevhen Stankovych: Complete Chamber Symphonies Vol.1 – Kyiv Chamber Orchestra

Between 1972 and 2018 the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych – born in 1942 and now the senior figure in Ukrainian music – produced a series of seventeen Chamber Symphonies, many of them doubling as concertos. This substantial body of music has remained largely unheard until now, even inside Ukraine, and should prove a major discovery for audiences everywhere. These works cover a kaleidoscopic range of moods – lyrical, rhythmically propulsive, bashfully hesitant, buoyantly assertive, elegiac, optimistic – expressed in a direct language with distant roots in the mild modernism of Berg, Britten, Janáček, Shostakovich and similar composers. Stankovych’s achievement is unparalleled in the history of music not simply because of the sheer number of his Chamber Symphonies – they also contain some of the finest music of the past half-century.