Roman Lytwyniw (violin) 28/02/2024

British/Ukrainian violinist, Roman Lytwyniw, is a versatile musician who likes to seek out opportunities which allow him to explore the expressive capabilities of the violin. He has performed at most major concert halls in the U.K including the Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, Buckingham Palace and recorded for a variety of different artists from differing genres and backgrounds. He is currently on the International Artist Diploma course at RNCM and will make his debut with the BBC Philharmonic in June.

In 2018 he formed and led Ensemble7 on an International tour with guitarist Miloš Karadaglič; performing for the BBC and ClassicFM in Cadogan Hall, Snape Maltings, Dubai Opera House and Aix-en-Provence. Roman is a passionate chamber musician and regularly performs in festivals such as; Budleigh, Whittington, Southwell, North Norfolk Chamber Music, Resonances and Schiermonikoogs. He also gave the U.K. premiere of Steven Gerber’s ‘Three Songs Without Words’ for the London Sinfonietta. He is regularly invited to perform in the role of Associate-Leader with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and recently enjoyed performing Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ with United Strings of Europe as well as leading the Jess Gillam Ensemble on tour.

Roman studied at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester and completed his Bachelor degree at the Royal Academy of Music with Mateja Marinkovic and So-Ock Kim. He has also worked with members of the Doric Quartet, London Haydn String Quartet, Lawrence Power, Tasmin Little, Anthony Marwood, Philippe Graffin, Kolja Blacher, and Charles Owen.

Leoš Janacek (1854-1928) was a Moravian/Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. Around the turn of the century he began to incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music, as well as his transcriptions of “speech melodies” of spoken language, into his already original compositional language. He sought greater realism and greater connection with everyday life.

His writing employs a vastly expanded view of tonality, uses unorthodox chord spacings and structures, but doesn’t remove tonality altogether: “there is no music without key. Atonality abolishes definite key, and thus tonal modulation…. Folksong knows of no atonality.” His Violin Sonata, composed in 1914 and then revised several times until 1922, features accompaniment figures and patterns comprising constant repetitions of short motifs which gather momentum in a cumulative manner. Janáček named these motifs “sčasovky” in his theoretical works. “Sčasovka” has no strict English equivalent, but John Tyrell, a leading specialist on Janáček’s music, describes it as “a little flash of time, almost a kind of musical capsule, which Janáček often used in slow music as tiny swift motifs with remarkably characteristic rhythms that are supposed to pepper the musical flow.” This sonata, which features harsh, mechanistic outbursts juxtaposed with tender human song, was written as a response to the First World War.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was a French Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was suffering from terminal cancer which prematurely ended his life, when he began to compose his Violin Sonata in G minor.

Its three short movements provide an astonishing range of moods and emotions within a relatively short time span and, according to a typically self-deprecating remark by the composer, it represents “an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.” Similar to Janacek, Debussy was profoundly affected by the war; in particular, he wished to assert a strong sense of nationalism in his music, even signing his score ‘Claude Debussy—musicien français’. There is an air of melancholic nostalgia that imbues this music alongside the flamboyant Hungarian flavour which arose from his fascination with a gypsy violinist he’d met in Budapest in 1910. The premiere took place on May 5th 1917 with soloist Gaston Poulet accompanied by Debussy himself. It was to be his final public performance and he died on March 25th the following year, at the age of 58.

Amy Beach (1867-1944) was an American composer, pianist, educator. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her “Gaelic Symphony”, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era.

Beach showed every sign of being a child prodigy, possessing perfect pitch and synesthesia. Having experienced early success as a performer, she was married at the age of 18 to a Boston surgeon and Harvard lecturer 24 years her senior. The marriage was conditioned upon her willingness to live according to his status, limit performances to two public recitals per year and to devote herself more to composition than to performance (although, as she wrote, “I thought I was a pianist first and foremost.”) Following her husband’s death in 1910, she returned to touring, education and mentoring young musicians and composers. The Romance, Op.23, was written in 1893 and showcases her abilities as both a pianist and a composer.

Eugene Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a Belgian virtuoso vioinist, composer and conductor. As a performer, Ysaÿe was compelling and highly original. Cellist Pablo Casals claimed never to have heard a violinist play in tune before Ysaÿe, and violinist Carl Flesch called him “the most outstanding and individual violinist I have ever heard in my life.” Ysaÿe possessed a large, flexible tone, varied vibrato and masterfully expressive rubato. He said, “Don’t always vibrate, but always be vibrating”. His modus operandi was, in his own words: “Nothing which wouldn’t have for goal emotion, poetry, heart.”

Ysaÿe was inspired by J.S Bach’s 1720 set of solo sonatas and partitas to compose violin works that represented the evolution of musical techniques and expressions of his time. As Ysaÿe claimed, “I have played everything from Bach to Debussy, for real art should be international.” Each sonata from this set of 6, composed in 1923, is dedicated to a different virtuoso violinist of the time. Ysaÿe recurrently warned violinists that they should never forget to play instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master “must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing.” His 5th Sonata was written for Mathieu Crickboom.

Ysaÿe was a friend of Claude Debussy and would sometimes correspond with him by letter. The two had great respect for each other and Ysaÿe was a significant supporter of the younger composer’s early career.

Bleed is written for solo violin with electronic accompaniment – the tape is constructed entirely from clips of the violin, distorted and reassembled. The idea of the music is that the live and recorded parts bleed into one another, like how ink bleeds into water. I imagined watching that process, and every so often pressing a ‘rewind button’, before letting the tape run through to the end, the ink fully and serenely diluted.

Joseph Howard (b.1993) is a British-Maltese composer based in London. He writes acoustic music, electronic music, and music for film and theatre.

Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020) was born in Gorlivka, Ukraine and at the age of 14, moved to Moscow where he had lessons with Avrelian Rubakh, who famously taught Vladimir Horowitz. He later studied with Alexander Goldenweiser at Moscow Conservatory. During the 1950’s Kapustin acquired a reputation as a jazz pianist, arranger and composer. He played as a member of Yuri Saulsky’s big band and later in the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra. In his compositions, he fused improvisational jazz idioms and traditional classical structures. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Soviet jazz scene. In spite of the constantly audible jazz idiom of his music, Kapustin did not see himself as a jazz musician: “I never sought to be a true jazz pianist, but I had to be on account of my composing. I am not interested in improvisation – and what is a jazz musician without improvisation? All improvisation, as far as I am concerned, is written down, and it is all the better for that; it is allowed to mature.” The Sonata Op. 70 in three movements for violin and piano was written in 1992.

“Two Colours” (Ukrainian: Два кольори, Dva kolory) is a 1964 song composed by Oleksandr Bilash, with lyrics by Dmytro Pavlychko.

Lyrics Translation:

When I was young, I prepared that in spring,
l’d travel around the world by pathways unknown,
My mother had embroidered a shirt for me,
With threads of red and threads of black,
With threads of red and black, embroidery.

The two colors of mine, the two colors,
You are both here upon the cloth, and in my soul.
The two colors of mine, the two colors,
The red one – that is love, the black one – that is sorrow.

I had wandered aimlessly throughout my life,
And in returning home to one’s own threshold,
All interwoven were they, like mom’s embroidery,
My fortunate, and sad, My fortunte and sad pathways.

The two colors of mine, the two colors,
You are both here upon the cloth, and in my soul.
The two colors of mine, the two colors,
The red one – that is love, the black one – that is grief.

I have noticed that I have become grey,
And I have nothing to bring back home with me,
Except a piece of old embroidered cloth,
And whole my life is embroidered…

And whole my life is embroidered on it