Stankovych: Complete Chamber Symphonies Vol. 1

Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych (*1942) is one of the most important living representatives of Ukrainian music. Between 1972 and 2018, he created an extensive cycle of seventeen chamber symphonies that has remained largely unnoticed to date—even in Ukraine.

The first part of the complete recording presents three of these works: Chamber Symphony No. 15 for viola and chamber orchestra, Chamber Symphony No. 7 for violin and chamber orchestra, and Chamber Symphony No. 3 for flute and strings. Stankovych combines the chamber symphony genre with concertante elements, bringing individual instruments to the fore.

His musical language moves between lyrical lines, striking rhythmic impulses, and restrained, contemplative passages. Stylistically, the works belong to the tradition of moderate modernism, with references to composers such as Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten, Leoš Janáček, and Dmitri Shostakovich, yet they develop a distinctive sound world of their own.

The recording with the Kyiv Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Natalia Ponomarchuk opens up access to a central, hitherto little-documented area of Stankovych's output and makes available a body of work that illuminates the development of Ukrainian music over the past decades from a unique perspective.