It was in the snows of Siberia, in exile, where Myroslav Skoryk, Ukraine’s famous composer and author of hundreds of famous tunes, got his first music lessons.
her Ukrainian intellectuals, was deported to Siberia. And though the composer was only 9, he still remembers the warmth of his music teachers, who kept on giving lessons despite deportation.
Skoryk devoted all his life to music. Many of his masterpieces became modern classics. His lyrical “Melody” is considered a spiritual anthem of Ukraine.
Maestro prefers writing music for symphony and chamber orchestras, but his lyrical melodies have been used countless times in theater and even cartoons. Skoryk is also an author of music for more than 40 films and scores of pop, jazz and rock music songs.
His opera Moses (2001) was even blessed by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Ukraine. It was the first time in the history of independent Ukraine that the Vatican supported a secular project and donated money to it.
A laureate of many music awards, the composer remains modest. Having participated in hundreds of concerts in Ukraine and abroad as bandmaster and pianist, Skoryk confesses that he gets nervous before each performance. “For me, every concert is special and I am still worried before each one,” he told the Kyiv Post.
Skoryk was brought up in a family of teachers and showed a taste for music in childhood. When his parents noticed that their six-year-old was writing music in his ABC book, they decided to take him to Solomiya Krushelnytska, his great aunt and one of the brightest soprano opera stars of the first half of the 20th century. “She noted my perfect ear and recommended that my parents send me to a music school,” Skoryk recalls.
He believes Krushelnytska’s involvement changed his life. Many years later, the grateful Skoryk dedicated the music for Butterfly’s Comeback ballet to her.
After the composer’s family managed to return to Lviv in 1955, after Stalin’s death, Skoryk studied in Mykola Lysenko Lviv State Music Academy and later in Piotr Chaykovskiy Moscow State Conservatory.
Even though the composer will turn 76 on July 13, he keeps active. Skoryk’s next performances are July 26 and 27 at the National Opera in Kyiv. The composer also teaches at the Lviv Conservatory and conducts the Youth Academic Symphony Orchestra INSO-Lviv.
On top of that, he has a number of hobbies. He loves jazz and prefers vacationing in Ukraine’s Carpathians. “I used to do canoeing, but I am no longer able to,” he says and adds that his main hobby now is mushroom picking.
Skoryk says he, like most Ukrainians, takes close to his heart the recent tragic events of EuroMaidan Revolution and the war in the country’s east.
The composer believes that an artist cannot stand aside and ensures his next musical creations will be dedicated to the slain heroes of Ukraine. He does not know what kind of music it will be.
“When I start writing music I never know how it will turn out at the end, but for sure, my suffering will be expressed in my music,” the composer says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at [email protected]
