Ukraine’s Lviv Philharmonic performs Mozart’s Requiem, following a delay for air-raid sirens. First-aid kits are stacked at left in front of the stage. Photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez/New York Times
“The audience members took their seats among boxes of medicine, first-aid kits and intravenous tubes. The orchestra was missing four men who are now fighting on the war’s front lines,” writes Erika Solomon in Saturday’s (5/21) New York Times. “The war in Ukraine has upended the meticulous planning that has gone into the Lviv Philharmonic’s annual summer music festival for four decades. But for musicians and the audience, the show must go on…. The [concert venue] … has become a coordination site for humanitarian supplies during the war…. The orchestra decided to open with Mozart’s Requiem … a tribute to the Ukrainians lost in three months of war…. About an hour before the concert started, air-raid sirens began to wail. [After the all-clear signal] the orchestra’s conductor, Volodymyr Syvokhip, … told the audience that as air-raid sirens sounded in Lviv, a bomb in the eastern Kharkiv region had reduced a cultural center to rubble…. When the requiem ended, members of the orchestra and their audience were in tears.” Said Liliia Svystovych, a teacher in the audience, “We understand that a requiem is about mourning, that it is sad music. But it is like a prayer. And a prayer is always a form of hope.”
