YSO Ukraine perform music for peace in Bach's church

There are moments when a concert is more than just a concert. When the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine joined the Gewandhaus Youth Choir in St. Thomas's Church on the opening night of the Leipzig Bach Festival (9 June 2022), the point was made with great force. Some of the young players had been brought from Lviv, but for the orchestra to gather, male players had to persuade the government in Kyiv to extract them from the fighting. Of the females, several are now refugees.

In Leipzig, the Gewandhaus community, the orchestra and choirs that Mendelssohn led and with which Kurt Masur was such a catalyst for the downfall of Communist East Germany in 1989, had the players staying in their homes - a taste of normality in the chaos. The concert was jointly conducted by Polina Lebedieva, still only 21, and the Gewandhaus choir master, Frank-Steffen Estler.

The programme, livestreamed on Facebook, revolved around Martin Luther's hymn Grant Us Peace, which he wrote in 1529 when he realised that his calls for ecclesiastical reform were quickly leading to political conflict. His fears were all too justified, for Leipzig was besieged six times in the religious Thirty Years War that engulfed the German States less than a century later and Johann Schein, the Cantor of St. Thomas's, lost many of his musicians to plague and injury. Luther's text continues, 'Grant our princes and all in authority peace and good governance, that under them we may lead a peaceful and quiet life.'

After Bach's setting from his cantata BWV 42, the combined forces and soloists gave his longest cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (I had much grief), BWV 21, Mahler's Suite from Bach's Orchestral Works (in which the YSOY's principal flute, 17 year-old Medoliz Tymofiy, shone), and the world premiere of Australian composer Glynn Davies' arrangement of the Suite on Ukrainian Themes by the 19th century Mykola Lyssenko, who studied in Leipzig and lived in St. Petersburg and Kyiv. The final piece was deeply emotional, though; Mendelssohn's setting of those words of Luther's.

After the introduction for strings conducted by Estler, the male choral quintet of Amacordplus sang them from Bach's organ gallery only a few metres from where Luther had preached his prophetic call for peaceful reform in 1539 and as they did so, the conductors changed over and Lebedieva guided the final ensemble. It is hard to think of a moment when music has so effectively shamed the purveyors of war.

Michael Maur, the Leipzig Bach Festival’s artistic director, said the idea for the concert came to him as a response to the Ukrainian conductor, Oxana Lyniv's online call in March for people to help the orchestra. 'My first idea was that our festival is in June and it would be the situation would be unclear but that we had to bring them here - and that we should not say, give a concert and go away. So we invited them for two weeks and came up with a programme in which Bach plays a role all through. So I chose a cantata which starts in grief and goes through the crisis into hope.'

You can find out more about the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukrainehere.

You can find out more about Leipzig Bach Festival here.