When the Fern Blooms review – celebrating the unwavering spirit of Ukrainian culture
Bombs? Missiles? Artillery shells? “Phooey!” At plucky Lviv National Opera (LNO) in western Ukraine, the show goes on, whatever’s being thrown at their country.
Unsurprisingly, the “goes on” is virtual. Surprisingly, as the frustrated Russian bear thrashes around more and more indiscriminately, denied its initial knockout blow, the LNO team is keeping calm and carrying on.
LNO has reissued a 2021 production of When the Fern Blooms, written by the seventy-nine-year young composer, Yevhen Stankovych, born in Svalyava, Ukraine. He has steeped himself in traditional Ukrainian culture pretty much since birth.
It’s currently available on Opera Vision for an extended run until 22 April.
Using swaddling folk songs, bespoke Orthodox chants, references to the European classical tradition, Stankovych has spent a lifetime crafting a truly original Ukrainian musical voice. When the Fern Blooms is arguably the zenith of his achievement.
This is more Féerie than opera — a luscious combination of mystical scenes, theatre, music, dance, song, acrobatics, and spectacular visual effects. There are no blow-your-head-off arias, nor is there a plot.
But there is a story. What a story. Of the birth of Ukraine’s culture rooted in folklore, often repeated attempts to extinguish it, powerful re-assertion and — here’s the terrifying bit — a spooky premonition of military threat, yet another attempt to sweep the nation away.
When the Fern Blooms makes use of transformation scenes in full view, trap doors, shafts of light reaching to heaven and fluid backdrop projections. The total effect is mesmerising.
For musical style, think Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The onward thrust of the music becomes almost demonic, matched by ever more complex dancing and acrobatics.
On first encounter, the work seems pagan. But the constant refrain, of events taking place on Kupala Night — 21 June, the shortest night of the year, an upmarket Ukrainian Druid shindig — is tempered by Christian references to St John’s night.
The point is to encompass the rich, multifaceted culture of a country so many “neighbours” have tried to steamroller into extinction over the centuries. It narrates the ups and downs of Loric love.
I think Stankovych is telling us all in no uncertain terms, “This is my country. Here I take my stand.” He is the musical equivalent of President Vladimir Zelensky. I can almost hear him thumping the table, “I don’t need a comfortable pastiche, I need an audience for my Ukrainian musical tradition.”
That principled tradition is well served by a cohort of native composers — dating from the 18th century until the present day — with whom the mainstream western classical is unfamiliar. What I mean is, I’ve never heard of them. To my eternal shame.
If they are lined up as favourites on your Spotify library, I salute you and bow my head, but I guess most of you huddle at the same end of my ignorance spectrum. Time to wise up.
Maksym Berezovsky 1745-1777, composed the first Ukrainian opera, Demofonte. He was well known, appeared as a character in a novel and studied with Mozart at the Bologna Philharmonic Academy.
The opera had nothing to do with Ukraine. It was set in Thrace — weren’t they all then? — libretto by go-to wordsmith, Pietro Metastasio, and completed in 1770 Italianate, high classical style. The music crackles and delights, and inspired a huge number of other works, including his more important, sacred, oeuvre, Do not Forsake Me.
A dramatic, Gregorian chant inspired choral concerto, utilising polyphony. Combining the sacred with the secular, this was an early version of crossover music.
Artem Vedel, 1767–1808, was born and lived his whole life in Kyiv. He was the first of many Ukrainian composers to be banned by Russian authorities, in his case Tsar Alexander II. His thought police snuffed out the tradition of choral concertos, which were not permitted again for 100 years.
Vedel took it badly. He was locked up in an asylum. But, his music, with his name scratched from the score, circulated widely and was sung in secret. Welcome to the tradition of politically incorrect, underground Ukrainian composition.
Dmitry Bortniansky, 1751-1825, was born in Ukraine, grew up singing in the choir of the Russian Imperial court, studied composition in Italy, and later became the first native Slavic Kapellmeister to the czars.
His version of Tantum Ergo became an imperial anthem, was edited by Tchaikovsky and played from the bell tower of the Kremlin each morning until the overthrow of the Romanovs.
In the 19th century, a nationalist movement blossomed. Mykola Lysenko, 1842-1912 is the father of modern Ukrainian music. A conductor, musicologist, and composer, he blended traditional folk music into his works, collecting seven volumes of folk songs in collaboration with poet, Taras Shevchenko.
Lysenko was intent on elevating Ukrainian culture to European standards and refused to allow his opera, Taras Bulba, based on the Gogol play, to be translated from the original Ukrainian. The opera is set in a suppressed and occupied Ukraine, this time by Poland. For nationalist composers, enemies surfed in on never-ending waves. An “embarrass de suppresseurs”.
He collected the music of Kobzar travelling musicians and other bandurists. These musicians were often blind and feared by the authorities. So much so that in 1932 Stalin convened a conference of Kobzars in Moscow. They were a political threat.
There was little conferencing. He executed all 337 of them. The atrocity is a live reminder of Russian dictators’ “snuff them out” attitude to anyone nurturing the Ukrainian national flame.
Lysenko touched hearts. One hundred thousand attended his funeral, to celebrate the music that breathes the vastness of the steppes and still stirs souls today.
In the 20th century, Boris Lyatoshinsky, 1895 – 1968, composed the first true Ukrainian symphony, influenced by Scriabin.
His music has a determined, hard-driving style. In the 1960s he set out his purpose: “The ring of the bells you hear reflects the passage of time. Centuries covered with the dust of eternity.”
It was sardonically said that in the 20th century if you wrote music with a Ukrainian idiom the best that could happen to you was that you were ignored.
This takes us to probably the best-known living Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov, a pupil of Lyatoshinsky.
A committed modernist until 1974, he changed style after an earnest discussion with his mentor, when Lyatoshinsky asked simply about one of his nerdy, brilliant atonal works, “Do you like this?” Nope!
Listen to Hélène Grimaud’s version of The Messenger 1996 to understand Silvestrov’s totally new tack. He commented, “A visitor from some other dimension in time came to us with a message”. It is a profoundly moving work, riffing off Mozart references, creating a mesmerising sound world.
Silvestro’s 2014 choral works, especially his anti-political Maidan 2014, which became the pro-democracy anthem of protestors is a sharp reminder it sometimes takes world events to make us pay attention to new music.
Lviv National Opera’s website has dedicated a page to five moving versions of the Ukraine National Anthem. Listen to them all. They embody the power of music to inspire, to overcome impossible odds. Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, famously performed in that Nazi besieged city with a scratch orchestra of half-frozen musicians, shone as a beacon of hope in 1942, shouting to the outside world, “We live”.
Lviv Opera lives, in even these darkest of days. Thank you for sharing When the Fern Blooms. Stankovych’s Ukrainian “Fern” will bloom again.