Conversation between Victoria Poleva and Leah BatstoneAbout this Event
The day before her work, The Bell, debuts at Carnegie Hall, Victoria Poleva sits down for a conversation with Leah Batstone of the Ukrainian Cultural Music Festival. Several of Victoria's piano pieces will be performed by New York-based Irena Portenko and Anna Shelest.
On October 30th, Victoria Poleva's work will be performed by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall as a part of their New Virtuoso: Borders concert.
VICTORIA POLEVA (b. 1962) was born in a family of musicians – her grandfather was a renowned singer and her father was a composer. She studied composition in the studio of Ivan Karabyts (1984-1989), and Levko Kolodub (1990-1995) at Kyiv Conservatory, where she also taught composition in 1990-2005. In her early works, including the ballet Gagaku, Transforma for symphony orchestra, Anthem for chamber orchestra and others, Polevá adopted avant-garde and polystylistic aesthetics. Since the late 1990s, she became increasingly drawn to spiritual themes and simplicity, and developed a style identified by European critics as “sacred minimalism.”
Polevá composes orchestral, choral, vocal, and chamber music, and frequently uses sacred texts.
Polevá’s works have been commissioned by leading international performers of contemporary music, including Gidon Kremer (in 2005 for an international project Sempre Primavera and in 2010 for an international project The Art of Instrumentation) and Kronos Quartet (Walking on Waters, 2013).
She was composer-in-residence at the Menhir Chamber Music Festival (Switzerland) in 2006, and at the XXX Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival (Austria) in 2011, at the Festival of Contemporary Music Darwin Vargas (Chile) in 2013 and other international festivals. In 2009, her Ode to Joy (for soloists, mixed choir, and symphony orchestra) was performed during an international concert commemorating of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Polevá's works have been performed at the Beethovenfest Bonn, Chamber Music Connects the World (Kronberg, Germany), the Dresdner Musikfestspiele, the Philharmonie Berlin, the Köln Philharmonie, the Theatre de Chatelet in Paris, the Rudolfinum-Dvorak Hall in Prague, the Yuri Bashmet Festival in Minsk, the Valery Gergiev Easter Festival in Moscow, the Auditorio Nacional de España in Madrid, the George Weston Recital Hall in Toronto, the Italian Academy in New York City, the Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco, the Oriental Art Center in Shanghai, the Seoul Art Center, the Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore, and at festivals of new music in Ukraine, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, United Arab Emirates, Peru and Chile.
According to , the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival's “very existence has always been a rejection of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s assertion that there is no real Ukrainian culture.” Founded in 2020, the Festival is dedicated to showcasing Ukraine’s complex and diverse contributions to contemporary music through performances, educational opportunities, and community engagement with composers, scholars, and performers. The Festival is the only one of its kind in North America, actively engaging the intersection of new music, current events, and Ukrainian culture.
Leah Batstone is a historical musicologist focusing on the intersections of political revolution and musical innovation at the peripheries of empire, particularly in late Habsburg Austria and 20th and 21st century Ukraine. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the NYU Jordan Center, where she is working on the first monograph on Ukrainian musical modernism, a project she began as a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Vienna’s REWIRE Programme, a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions project COFUND supported by the European Commission. Her proposal for a handbook on the first symphony of Ukrainian composer Stefania Turkevych is under consideration at the recently relaunched Cambridge Music Handbooks Series, and she is co-editing the volume Perspectives on Ukrainian Music with Peter Schmelz for Indiana University Press. Her first monograph, Mahler’s Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies, was published in 2023 by Boydell & Brewer. Her scholarship has been published in 19th Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Music & Letters, as well as on the American Musicological Society’s online platform Musicology Now. She received her PhD in musicology from McGill University in 2019 and holds a Master’s in musicology from the University of Oxford. She is the founder and creative director of the annual Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in New York City.
The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) represents endless possibility. To date, the ensemble has performed works by more than 800 American composers—a stunning number that becomes even more amazing upon seeing the list of names. Its first concert of the Carnegie Hall season includes world premieres by rising composers Paul Novak and Kebra-Seyoun Charles, who joins on bass. ACO welcomes guitarist Mak Grgić in a New York premiere by Michael Abels, who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his work with Rhiannon Giddens. The orchestra also performs the New York premiere of Ukrainian composer Victoria Polevá’s The Bell with cellist Inbal Segev, who premiered the piece in 2023 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
Event Venue
Faust Harrison Pianos, 207 West 58th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
