“Chicago Opera Theater will present ‘Voices of Refuge,’ a series of open-air chamber concerts Aug. 29 and 30 at the Chicago History Museum,” writes Howard Reich in Monday’s (8/24) Chicago Tribune. “The repertoire will remind listeners that music by Chopin, Bartók, Rachmaninoff and, yes, even Irving Berlin was the work of refugees. ‘Voices of Refuge’ will be a joint venture between the opera company and the Refugee Orchestra Project, which COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya founded in 2015…. ‘As a young child [in St. Petersburg, Russia], I went to my children’s choir rehearsal several times a week in the center of town,’ says Yankovskaya. ‘There would be demonstrations with swastikas flying high. People would be handing out pamphlets saying, “Kill all the Jews, they are ruining our country.” ’ Because Yankovskaya’s parents had family in the U.S., they were able immigrate here in 1995…. The ‘Voices of Refuge’ concert also will feature music of living composers, such as Milad Yousufi, born 1995 during the civil war in Afghanistan. This era of coronavirus makes such a concert more timely than ever, [because] ‘there’s a lot less travel, which leads to a lot less exchange of ideas,’ says Yankovskaya.”
Read Symphony magazine’s coverage of Yankovskaya here.
