With apps giving them air-raid warnings, the Kyiv-based musicians now see themselves as soldiers and their instruments as weapons. So what will they play when they arrive in Britain this month?
‘P
eople often ask me about my work with Ukrainian musicians,” says the Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson. “They will say things like, ‘How are things out there? We don’t hear much about the war, I guess it’s all calmed down a bit.’ When I hear that I want to scream, ‘No, it really hasn’t calmed down!’.”
Wilson established the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in the weeks after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With her husband, Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she contacted leaders of the world’s top international orchestras and located dozens of elite Ukrainian musicians – some working in western Europe, some who had fled Russia, others performing in Kyiv, Lviv or Odesa – to establish a 75-piece “battalion of culture” who would assemble for a few weeks each year.
The UFO were stars of the 2022 Proms, earned rave reviews around the world, received a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and toured their titanic version of Beethoven’s Ninth in 2023 and 2024, translating Schiller’s lyric into Ukrainian and turning his “ode to joy” into a declaration of “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine). However, after three and a half years of relentless conflict, Wilson admits that the orchestra may be a victim of compassion fatigue. “There’s a danger that the world could lose interest, just as the Russian bombing gets ever more brutal, and as more and more Ukrainians are killed. I guess the only way we can get that story across is to keep on fighting through music.”
