Although the line that separates Ukraine culturally, geographically and politically from its larger neighbour is not always easy to trace, it may come as a surprise (it did to me) that many titans of the ‘Russian’ school of violin playing – Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan among them – were born in what we know today as Ukraine. Oleh Krysa is another Ukrainian violinist, and one determined to see his country’s cultural achievements given the credit they deserve. A student of Oistrakh, Krysa has taught at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, since 1989 and gives his name to the triennial Oleh Krysa International Violin Competition, which began in 2013. He also chairs its jury. In October I travelled to Lviv, close to Ukraine’s border with Poland, to meet him and to hear the six finalists perform in the 2019 edition.
‘All the important Soviet artists passed through here on their way to the West,’ he says of the city where he spent his formative years. ‘Coming in the opposite direction was Arthur Rubinstein, and before him Chopin and Sarasate. Lviv has always been at the intersection of two different worlds.’ The genteel city’s cobbled streets are a world away from Donbas, Ukraine’s easternmost region, where since 2014 as many as 13,000 people have been killed in armed conflict between Russian and Ukrainian nationalists. ‘People are dying every day,’ says Krysa, ‘but it doesn’t mean that we should stop making music – we have to play on. I wanted to give young Ukrainian violinists a chance to demonstrate their talents in their home country, and to give everyone else a chance to hear what they could do.’