Ukraine has not always been generous to its own composers. The Soviet system that shaped Ivan Karabits — born in Yalta in 1945, dead too soon in 2002 — demanded ideological compliance on one hand and offered institutional support on the other, a bargain that warped careers and silenced voices across generations. That Karabits managed to build something genuinely personal within those constraints, and then to flourish after Ukrainian independence in 1991 as the country’s most prominent composer, suggests a resilience and originality worth taking seriously. This disc, conducted by his son Kirill with the Bournemouth Symphony, makes the case compellingly — and with world premiere recordings of all three concertos for orchestra, it arrives with the particular excitement of genuinely uncharted territory.
The comparison to Rodion Shchedrin is not incidental. Shchedrin was friend and mentor to Karabits, and his own five concertos for orchestra — leaner, more ironically distanced than Bartók’s great archetype — clearly gave Karabits both a model and a permission slip. But Karabits is not Shchedrin. Where Shchedrin tends toward wit sharpened to something near cruelty, Karabits is warmer, more volatile, occasionally closer to the Ukrainian folk tradition that runs deep beneath the surface of his writing like a subterranean river — felt more than seen.
The second concerto is the place to start. Bold. Purposeful. There is no meandering, no moment where the composer seems to have lost the thread, and that discipline is rarer than it sounds in music of this density. The opening statement — the whole orchestra in unison declaration — has the quality of someone who knows exactly what they want to say and is not interested in small talk. What follows is not a simple unfolding of that statement but something more restless, the strings pulling away into a fractured interlude that sounds almost like a conversation interrupted. Karabits had a gift for orchestral color that never becomes mere decoration; the timbral shifts here feel structural, load-bearing.
The first concerto, subtitled Musikalnoe prinosheniye Kievu — Musical Gift to Kiev — is the most ceremonial of the three, composed in 1980–81 when Ukraine was still firmly inside the Soviet orbit, and you can hear that context without it being suffocating. There is civic grandeur here, but also something genuinely affectionate, a composer writing a love letter to a city rather than filing a report.
Then there is the third concerto, Holosinnya — Lamentations — from 1989, the year the Soviet world began visibly to crack. It is the most searching of the three, and also the most personal. The title carries the weight of a specific Ukrainian tradition of ritualized mourning, and Karabits does not treat that lightly. The music has a rawness that the earlier concertos, for all their energy, do not quite reach.
Valentin Silvestrov’s two pieces round out the program with characteristic otherworldliness. Silvestrov — still composing in his late eighties, still circling the same luminous, unresolvable questions — offers the Elegie and Abschiedsserenade as a kind of extended farewell, music that seems to be leaving the room even as it plays. The contrast with Karabits is striking and clearly intentional: where Karabits reaches outward, Silvestrov withdraws inward. Together they bracket something essential about Ukrainian musical life at the turn of this century.
Kirill Karabits conducts this music with an authority that goes beyond filial devotion. The Bournemouth strings have real presence — lean but not thin — and the brass manage the big moments without turning them into mere volume. Whether conducting his father’s music imposes an interpretive limitation or confers an interpretive advantage is a question I genuinely cannot answer. What I can say is that nothing here sounds tentative or secondhand.
A remarkable disc. Put it simply: Ivan Karabits deserved better than obscurity, and this album begins to correct that.
