Writing for The Observer, Ed Vulliamy writes about the response of Ukrainian musicians to the Russian invasion of their country, from the opera house in Lviv to a nightspot in Kyiv.
“Music is a universal language. But music also comes from where you come from; it reflects the feeling of home, and what home means – and on the obligation to protect your family, your neighbour,” says Andriy Khlyvnyuk, the singer-songwriter of the Ukrainian pop band Boom Box who has spent the war in a police combat unit. “Anyone who grew up learning their language, and their poets and music by heart knows to say to the empire, any empire: ‘You will not do this to us.’ ”
Yevhen Stankovych, the Ukrainian composer of “The Terrible Revenge,” a new opera based on the Nikolai Gogol story, writes of his work and that of the country’s other artists, “All of this resonates with our reality, and what is happening.”
Letter V 