You're reading: Opera singer speaks of his enchantment with art songs

Pavlo Hunka, a 57-year-old British opera star of Ukrainian origin, was 17 when he first heard the Ukrainian art songs written by composer Kyrylo Stetsenko.


He was impressed, but there was no one to share his delight. Although Hunka lived in Coventry, a city in central England with a culturally active Ukrainian diaspora community, hardly any Ukrainians, let alone British people, knew anything about Ukrainian art songs at that time.

“People just didn’t understand what I was talking about,” Hunka recalls.

Hunka made it his mission to change that. Over the next 35 years the singer, together with his wife Larysa, have been searching for and collecting rare Ukrainian art songs. Their collection now numbers 1,160 songs written by 26 composers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The art song genre, which is usually written for one voice singing poetry combined with music for a solo instrument or duet, first appeared in Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. In Ukraine, the genre backs to the late 19th century, with Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko being the best known composer of art songs.

Although every nation has its art songs, Ukrainian ones are unique, as they combine Western and Eastern musical motifs, according to Hunka.

“Ukrainian composers had Polish, German and French influences. (But) Turkish and even Indian motifs can also be found in their melodies,” Hunka says.

Thanks to Hunka’s efforts, Ukrainian art songs are now being heard on the world’s greatest opera stages in New York, Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto.

“People come up (to me) after the concerts to say they loved the songs, and ask why they haven’t heard them earlier,” he says.

To make Ukrainian art songs more popular around the globe, Hunka in 2004 together with a group of Canadian enthusiasts launched the Ukrainian Art Song Project to record and publish an anthology of Ukrainian art songs.

The label has recorded 352 masterpieces by composers like Lysenko, Kyrylo Stetsenko, Yakiv Stepovyi, Stefania Turkewich and Vasyl Barvinsky. All the songs can be downloaded at the project’s website (www.ukrainianartsong.ca) for free.

“When a Ukrainian art song is performed on stage, people start to respect Ukrainians as a cultural nation,” Hunka says, adding that recently an English musicologist and a Ph.D. student from South Korea chose Ukrainian art songs as a subject for their theses. “There is growing interest in this kind of Ukrainian artistry in the world.”

Just like the promotion of Ukrainian art songs, which started as a hobby and turned into his vocation, a chance happening also determined Hunka’s career choice.

“One day, I went to the Manchester Conservatory and performed a Ukrainian song “Hude Viter Velmy v Poli” (“A Strong Wind Howls in the Field”) for the teachers. They were captivated by my singing,” he recalls.

To become an opera singer Hunka, then 28, left his well-paid job as a lawyer and studied at the Royal Northern College of Music for nearly two years.

In his 27 years on stage, Hunka had performed in more than 80 operas in the world’s best opera houses. But he remains modest.

“I’m still learning. I’ve never sung perfectly in my life. I get worried about forgetting the words,” the opera singer said, referring to an upcoming concert in Kyiv’s philharmonic scheduled for June 5, where Hunka will perform works by Lysenko, Yakiv Stepovy, Oleksand Yakovchuk set to verses by Taras Shevchenko and William Shakespeare.

“I want Ukrainians to know what great cultural richness they possess,” Hunka said.

You can watch a documentary about Hunka and his work on the Ukrainian Art Song Project here: n