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International Orchestras and Recitals

Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra Keri-Lynn Wilson conductor Emily Pogorelc soprano

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Sat. 22 August ’26

Fáilte Welcome Greetings from Ukraine! I would like to extend my heartfelt greetings to every member of the audience in this hall and every musician of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra. To me, this orchestra is truly unique. It performs on behalf of millions of my fellow Ukrainians who cannot hear this music right now – those in bomb shelters, those recovering from their wounds in hospital beds, or those defending our home on the front line. The orchestra’s musicians literally embody our nation, as many of them have been forced to leave their homes because of the war. You do not have to be Ukrainian to understand our art – compassion and humanity are enough. Music says far more than news reports or speeches ever can. It breaks down fear and indifference, uniting people in their refusal to accept evil and inspiring them to act. I am sincerely grateful to each and every one of you for hearing us.

Can music counter violence and aggression? I am certain that it can. Music breaks down fear and indifference and instead brings people together through shared feelings. And when people are united, they can accomplish a lot. Above all, they can refuse to tolerate evil. They can refuse to accept it as normal. They can do what they can, wherever they are – just as the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra is doing. So thank you for becoming part of this. May music and humanity be heard. And may the unity of caring people around the world finally render Russian weapons powerless. Thank you. Olena Zelenska First Lady of Ukraine, Founder of the Olena Zelenska Foundation

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Fáilte Welcome It is a great pleasure to welcome the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra to the National Concert Hall. This evening’s concert opens the National Concert Hall’s cultural programme marking Ireland’s 2026 Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and is presented in collaboration with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. We are grateful for the Government of Ireland’s support for the orchestra and its international tour of Europe and North America. Since its formation in 2022, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra has brought together outstanding Ukrainian musicians from Ukraine and across Europe, performing for audiences around the world under its founding conductor, Keri-Lynn Wilson. Tonight’s programme brings together the music of Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak with Mahler’s deeply personal Rückert-Lieder and the extraordinary energy of Beethoven’s 2

Seventh Symphony. It is a programme that speaks above all through the musicians themselves and through the remarkable communicative power of orchestral music. I warmly welcome Keri-Lynn Wilson, Emily Pogorelc and the musicians of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra to the National Concert Hall, and hope you enjoy what promises to be a very special evening.

Nigel Flegg CEO

INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRAS AND RECITALS

Programme Bohdana Frolyak Gloria (11 minutes) Mahler

Rückert-Lieder (18 minutes) I. Liebst du um Schönheit ("If you love for beauty") II. Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! ("Do not look at my songs!") III. Um Mitternacht ("At midnight") IV. Ich atmet' einen Linden Duft ("I breathed a gentle fragrance") V. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen ("I am lost to the world") Interval Beethoven

Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 (c. 35-45 minutes) I. Poco sostenuto – Vivace II. Allegretto III. Presto IV. Allegro con brio

Scan here for more information about the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, Keri-Lynn Wilson and soprano Emily Pogorelc.

— Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra and Keri-Lynn Wilson

— Emily Pogorelc

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INTERNATIONAL ORCHESTRAS AND RECITALS

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Programme Notes Bohdana Frolyak (b.1968): Gloria Bohdana Frolyak’s Gloria for symphony orchestra is dedicated to Ukrainian heroes and was composed especially for the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra. One of the most recognized Ukrainian composers working today, Frolyak teaches composition at Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy. A multiple award winner, she has written symphonic, choral, and chamber music and is the co-creator of the musical stage work The War that Changed Rondo (Війна, що змінила Рондо), based on a text by Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv. Her works are performed at numerous festivals of contemporary music, from Ukraine and Azerbaijan through Poland, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the United Kingdom to Canada and the United States. What can we expect from Gloria? Frolyak’s music is deep and immersed in reflection, yet sensuous at the same time. It contains many echoes of tradition: Its carefully considered texture and mastery of 6

structural detail bring it close to the 20th-century Polish avant-garde, to the music of Krzysztof Penderecki or Witold Lutosławski. Her fondness for refined coloristic effects and unexpected combinations of timbre suggests, in turn, an affinity with composers such as Maurice Ravel or Igor Stravinsky, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer who suffered a particularly tragic fate. Tragedy is indeed a key aesthetic category for interpreting Frolyak’s monumental yet nobly simple works. The composer stands before us like a contemporary Hecuba, Electra, or Antigone, tirelessly mourning the fate of her loved ones, faithful in her grief, transforming into art a suffering that exceeds human comprehension. After the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, Beethoven reportedly said that if he understood war as well as he understood music, he could defeat Napoleon Bonaparte himself. But is that really so? Who understands war better, the strategist or the one who is plunged into the chaos it brings? The player or the one being played? The victor or the conquered? The one who goes off to die or the one

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who stays behind, with his loneliness and despair? Is it the soldier? The immigrant? The prisoner? The wronged woman or child? So many questions to which music gives no answer. All it can do, and it is no small feat, is open our senses to what is incomprehensible and unknown, and speak for us the things that cannot be put into words. On this calm summer evening, let us listen to sounds that not only soothe and calm us, but above all do not let us forget. Note by Małgorzata Lisecka Mahler Rückert-Lieder Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, published in a 1910 collection alongside two songs on folk poetry from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, do not form a song cycle in the traditional sense. Though the five songs are commonly performed together, Mahler did not originally intend for them to be, as is evident from the wide variation of instrumentation and the lack of clear musical connections between songs. As such, there is also no standard order of performance, each artist chooses the progression of songs that makes the most sense in his or her own mind. What holds the “cycle” together is the selection of texts and the character of Mahler’s settings.

Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a college professor and extremely prolific writer, had full command of more than 30 languages and was best known as an outstanding translator of Oriental poetry as well as original poetry in the style of those foreign works. The texts Mahler chose for these five songs, however, belong to the rather more traditional style of German romantic poetry, so familiar from the lieder of Mahler’s predecessors (especially Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf), who perfectly captured in music the verse of the great German lyric poets, such as Goethe and Heine. Just as these five poems by Rückert are very traditional compared to the folk poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn—with which Mahler was infatuated for many years prior to the composition of the Rückert-Lieder, and the Orientalist texts upon which the composer based his late masterpiece Das Lied von der Erde, so the musical settings are very traditional compared to most of Mahler’s work. “Ich atmet' einen Linden Duft” is a lovely pastoral setting evoking the fresh, gentle aroma of a twig of linden left behind by a lover. The song becomes almost a duet between the singer and the winds as they echo one another and allow their phrases to intertwine. “Liebst du um Schönheit” is the only one of the five songs not orchestrated by Mahler himself; its original piano accompaniment was 7

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orchestrated by the first publisher. Written as a gift to his new wife Alma, its music is ardent yet intimate and simple, matching the poem’s four short stanzas of eloquent and heartfelt verse on the futility of loving for beauty, youth, or money if it is not accompanied by true love. The song that veers farthest afield of the traditional, “Um Mitternacht” sets a darkly meandering text of ambiguous philosophical and existential ruminations. Mahler’s music here is fascinating and varied, calling for an orchestra without strings and joining the singer’s almost desperate strains with a chorale-like, sometimes contrapuntal, accompaniment that surges and recedes until its final triumphant fanfare. “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder,” a charming miniature that ends almost as soon as it’s begun, returns to more grounded territory, addressing the insecurity of the artist, a topic close to Mahler’s heart. The composer uses Rückert’s analogy of a poet’s work to that of industrious bees building a honeycomb as the thematic inspiration for his music, establishing at the outset an insistent buzzing that continues throughout the song. “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” represents Mahler’s first clear foray, both in text and music—into a style and a theme that would permeate and define his late 8

masterpieces: peaceful resignation in the face of approaching oblivion. Mahler’s unique ability to create music in which human melancholy seems to melt away into a mesmerizing, otherworldly sense of tranquility reached its pinnacle in the Ninth and unfinished Tenth symphonies, as well as Das Lied von der Erde, but it began here. Even in 1901, during one of the happiest periods of his life and before the crushing series of professional setbacks and personal tragedies that darkened his final years, Mahler recognized that Rückert’s world-weary poem, whose title translates to “I am lost to the world”, and his own ethereal musical setting of it, encapsulated his identity as an artist and a man, saying “It is I myself.” Notes by Jay Goodwin 2026 Beethoven Symphony No. 7 “All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart, become here the blissful insolence of joy, which snatches us away with bacchanalian might and bears us through the roomy space of Nature, through all the streams and seas of Life, shouting in glad self-consciousness as we sound throughout the universe the daring strains of this human sphere-dance.” So Wagner famously raved about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, his outburst just one link in a long,

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distinguished chain of effusive praise and fanciful interpretation the work has received from composers, musicians, critics, and audiences alike, beginning with Beethoven himself, who called the piece one of his “most excellent works.” The enthusiastic response this music has inspired over the past 200 years is no surprise to anyone who has heard it, and is an appropriate reflection of the enthusiasm of the symphony itself, the most extroverted and infectious of Beethoven’s nine.

high. Beethoven capitalized on this celebratory atmosphere, designating his December concert a benefit for wounded Austro-Bavarian troops and premiering his Symphony No. 7 alongside the newly composed Wellington’s Victory, a bombastic and topical work that became a sensation amid the nationalistic fervor of the time. The concert was so successful and the audience response so rapturous that the performance was repeated in its entirety four days later.

Composed in late 1811 and early 1812, the Seventh Symphony had to wait nearly two years for its premiere, which it received in Vienna in December 1813 under exceptional circumstances. In June of the same year, French forces led by Joseph Bonaparte suffered a grave defeat at the hands of British, Spanish, and Portuguese troops under the command of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, in the Battle of Vitoria, which spelled the end of French rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Coming on the heels of Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia in late 1812 and the catastrophic retreat that followed, Duke Wellington’s victory in Spain sounded the death knell of the emperor’s European conquest. For Austrians, who could see peace on the horizon following two decades in which they had gone to war with France four different times, patriotism was consequently running

The Seventh Symphony’s premiere was also notable for purely musical reasons. Unlike most of Beethoven’s great works, which suffered mediocre to shambolic debut performances at the hands of under-rehearsed and insufficiently gifted players, the Seventh Symphony’s premiere boasted an outstanding orchestra peppered with some of Europe’s finest musicians, including composer-virtuosos Louis Spohr, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Antonio Salieri, as well as famed quartet leader Ignaz Schuppanzigh and Italian double bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti, among others. Adding to the drama was Beethoven’s decision to handle the conducting responsibilities himself, with verve and vigor undiminished by his almost complete inability to hear the orchestra. Spohr 9

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documented the scene: “So often as a sforzando occurred, he tore his arms, which he had previously crossed upon his breast, violently asunder. At a piano, he bent himself down, and the lower the softer he wished to have it. Then, when a crescendo came, he raised himself again by degrees, and upon the commencement of the forte, he jumped into the air. To increase the forte yet more, he would also join in with a shout to the orchestra, without being aware of it.” It is comforting to know that such antics are not the exclusive domain of modernday conductors. Beethoven’s histrionics are understandable, however, given the driving momentum and rhythmic punch that are the defining characteristics of this music. Of all of the composer’s symphonies, the Seventh is the most primal, the most powerful demonstration of music as a pure, elemental force. It does not have the heroic grandeur of the Third, the dramatic struggle of the Fifth, the bucolic charm of the Sixth, or the transcendence of the Ninth, but none of those great works can match the Seventh for sheer dynamism and kinetic energy. Here, Beethoven gives us music of contagious vivacity, irresistible in its power to compel movement. As a listener, it is virtually impossible to last a whole movement 10

without tapping one’s foot, drumming one’s fingers, or bobbing one’s head. This masterpiece is often described as being inspired by, or an elevation of, dance music, but really it’s more purely athletic than that, music not for ballerinas but for racehorses. Swept away by Beethoven’s symphonic thoroughbred, there is nothing for the audience to do but hang on and enjoy the exhilarating ride.

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