About

Having been touring the world for three years, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra is coming to Vilnius! Its founder, conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, is well-known to our audiences as she has already conducted a number of impressive programmes at the National Philharmonic. Her career spans more than twenty years, and she has led some of the world’s most renowned orchestras, including the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Japan’s NHK, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, the French National Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, etc. Wilson has collaborated with some of the world’s most renowned opera houses, including the Metropolitan in New York, the Royal Opera House in London, the Bavarian and Viennese state opera houses, Washington National Opera, the New National Theatre Tokyo, and Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón.  

Wilson founded the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in spring 2022 as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is made up of musicians from Ukraine, war refugees and Ukrainians living abroad. The Orchestra’s list of tours and performances is ever-growing and includes the world’s most famous stages, cathedrals and festivals. To mark the first anniversary of war, Wilson initiated a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Lviv Opera House, and on the second anniversary of the invasion, a recording of her and the Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was released by Deutsche Grammophon. The Orchestra is honorary patronised by the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, while Wilson was awarded the Order of Princess Olga by the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. 

The concert will feature the premiere of a work by Ukrainian composer and oboist Maxim Kolomiiets. The composer is a winner of numerous competitions, his music has been performed at festivals in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belgium and the USA by the Wiener Symphoniker, the Arditti Quartet, the Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), and the Amaryllis Quartet (Hamburg). In 2023, as part of the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center’s new works programme, the composer was commissioned to compose an opera about kidnapped Ukrainian children.

The concert programme also includes a selection of immortal classics. Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859) is a tragic chant of unhappy love, which, according to the composer, opens up “the depths of spiritual experience”. There is hardly any stage action, and the music reveals various shades of the two protagonists’ love – the anticipation, sorrow and suffering, the longing for death and the jubilation. Wagner’s Isolde will feature the American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen, who has appeared at the Metropolitan, Covent Garden, Naples’ San Carlo, the state opera theatres in Bavaria, Berlin, Vienna and other opera houses.

After the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Schicksalssinfonie/Fate, in 1808, the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote in his essay Beethoven’s Instrumental Music: “What instrumental work of Beethoven testifies to this to a higher degree than the immeasurably noble and profound Symphony in C minor? How this marvellous composition carries the hearer irresistibly with it in its ever-mounting climax into the spirit kingdom of the infinite!<...> The deep links between structures and themes, invisible to the naked eye and revealed only in the meeting of minds, proclaim the genius of the Master.”

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