The Valley of Seven Suns

The evening of chamber music begins with a work that resonates with the full depth of romantic feeling. Anton Webern’s "Langsamer Satz" offers a rare opportunity to hear the early Webern—still in love with the beauty of tonal harmony and the sincerity of melodic expression. The music breathes with tenderness, tremulous excitement, and a luminous sadness, revealing a completely different side of the future avant-gardist.

The Kyiv premiere of "The Valley of Seven Suns" by Maksym Kolomiiets immerses the listener in an entirely different sonic world—mysterious, vibrating, and filled with hidden power. The piece, which the composer describes as a ray of hope and optimism for us all in these incredibly difficult times, was written specifically for Andrii Pavlov (violin) and Ustym Zhuk (viola), and today offers a unique chance to hear it performed by these very musicians. The solo violin and viola engage in an intense dialogue against the dense, shimmering texture of the string orchestra. This is music that keeps the listener in constant anticipation: it contains meditative stillness, sudden bursts of sonority, and a delicate balance between silence and emotional release.

The final chord of the evening will be Béla Bartók’s "Divertimento for String Orchestra." This is a work of staggering inner energy and dramatic contrasts. The outer movements captivate with their swift, almost wild rhythmic drive and the elemental joy of motion. In contrast, the central slow movement strikes with its somber depth—it is music of almost physically tangible anxiety, pain, and oppressive loneliness, written on the eve of World War II. Bartók creates a sonic canvas of extraordinary power, where a refined neoclassical form is filled with the untamable temperament and poignant expression of the mid-20th century.