The viewers members took their seats amongst bins of drugs, first-aid kits and intravenous tubes. The orchestra was lacking 4 males who are actually preventing on the battle’s entrance strains. A handful of visitor singers who had fled bombings and bloodshed stood onstage with the choir.
The battle in Ukraine has upended the meticulous planning that has gone into the Lviv Philharmonic’s annual summer time music pageant for 4 a long time. But for musicians and the viewers, the present should go on.
Even because the area — a Baroque, pastel-colored chamber in western Ukraine — has grow to be a coordination web site for humanitarian provides in the course of the battle, it has remained a house to musicians and choirs. This spring, as an alternative of enjoying upbeat music on the pageant’s first efficiency, the orchestra determined to open with Mozart’s Requiem.
The live performance, carried out on Friday night time, was a tribute to the Ukrainians misplaced in three months of battle.
“This is a place now for medicine — for the body and the soul,” stated Liliia Svystovych, a instructor within the viewers. “We understand that a requiem is about mourning, that it is sad music. But it is like a prayer. And a prayer is always a form of hope.”
About an hour earlier than the live performance began, air-raid sirens started to wail.
Iolanta Pryshlyak, the director of Lviv’s International Symphony Orchestra, was making ready to delay the live performance till the all-clear sounded. As she waited in a again room the place docs had been packing up medical provides, she took telephone calls from volunteers who had been driving support to Ukraine’s embattled east.
Ms. Pryshlyak, 59, just isn’t solely the orchestra director now. Since the invasion started, she has additionally directed the circulate of provides that move by the theater on their option to the battle’s entrance strains. It is her base for each jobs.
She had been up since 4 a.m., and he or she was drained: “I’m just running on autopilot.”
Still, she was trying ahead to an evening of music. “War makes your heart like a stone,” she stated. “But music can soften it again.”
Downstairs, the orchestra’s conductor, Volodymyr Syvokhip, placed on a swimsuit in his workplace as a baritone soloist sang arpeggios in a close-by room.
For weeks, performers had rehearsed amid towers of humanitarian support bins as volunteers and docs organized provides throughout them. Sometimes the musicians would assist the help employees. And typically the medics would cease their work to take heed to them play.
“We are supporting each other through this, in some way,” Mr. Syvokhip stated with a smile.
As he went onstage, Mr. Syvokhip advised the viewers that as air-raid sirens sounded in Lviv, a bomb within the japanese Kharkiv area had decreased a cultural heart to rubble, and with it, the native theater.
When the requiem ended, members of the orchestra and their viewers had been in tears.
“The sound of those alarms and sirens combined in our heads with the words of the conductor, and we understood why musicians must not keep silent,” stated Natalia Dub, a headmistress at an area academy.
She had put as a lot care into her look this 12 months as she had for summer time festivals earlier than it, with crimson lipstick and a string of pearls.
“We need to come here,” she stated. “This is the place we need to be most of all.”