Last summer there was a series of rather unexpected and rewarding performances of my piece for voice and percussion quartet “Weeping for a dead love” in Italy. This was the first work I wrote for myself to sing in pseudo-folk style and I honestly didn’t expect any other singers to ever perform it, let alone classically trained singers. In Ukraine, there’s virtually no mixing between the folk and classical realms because the folk timbre supposedly ruins your voice (it doesn’t if you sing in a healthy way).

So I was very surprised when mezzo-soprano Svitlana Melnyk took on the piece. She fled from Kharkiv to Italy, where the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali di Reggio Emilia has been hosting displaced faculty and students from Ukraine. The institute just posted a video of one of the performances on YouTube.

Svitlana performs with percussion students from the conservatory, including another displaced Ukrainian. Svitlana sings the folk-inspired work in her own more classical way, powerfully and with a great deal of feeling. She told me that the work speaks to her own grief of living through war and displacement. It means a lot to me that she and other Ukrainians have connected to my music in that way. This project was initiated by Simone Beneventi, a percussionist who teaches at Reggio Emilia.