Concepcellos from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus
From today’s Cello+ concert in Kyiv one can conclude that young East European composers know how to compose beautiful melodies. Nice - even if a piece is dull overall (like Impromptu for cello and clarinet), it is not unpleasant to listen to. A little worse when someone thinks that sticking two canonic themes on the top of each other with very few changes is called composition (as I believe Victoria Poliova does), but at least her piece was useful to create a concept of a concert that begins and ends with tributes to Bach and boasts to present some conceptual music. In contrast to Poliova, Zoltan Almashy can compose a good piece of his own with inspiration from Bach cello suite, one of the three delights of the evening.
Another good thing about the young is that their pieces are short - while Alexey Schmurak seems to see some dim light at the end of a very long tunnel called “learning to understand and compose conceptual music” (whatever he believes that is) - it would be painful to see him straining his throat for another minute.
Perhaps people in Belarus are very much aware how it feels to live with a phobia, or at least know how it should sound, as apparent from Andrey Tsalko's composition. My favorite from the night was Liubava Sydorenko’s Lumiere for violin and cello - powerful, poignant and beautiful, as described by her newly-backed fan Alotro from Brazil.