Alla Zagaykevych “Vyshyvanyi”
The opera “Vyshyvanyi. King of Ukraine” is a historical work about Wilhelm von Habsburg, a descendant of the old imperial dynasty who aligned himself with Ukraine and died in 1948 in Kyiv’s Lukyanivska Prison, suspected of involvement in Ukrainian national liberation organizations.
It’s a legendary and tragic story, turned into the “virtual reality” of musical theater. But it has one key difference from standard historical opera narratives of the past: the story of “Vyshyvanyi” as “King of Ukraine” is imagined, phantom-like – a story that “could have happened.” It holds more questions than answers, more searching, reverie, and dreams than certainties.
The creative team behind “Vyshyvanyi” represents the best of Ukrainian art today: a triumvirate of leading cultural figures – the composer Alla Zagaykevych, the writer and poet Serhiy Zhadan, and theater director Rostyslav Derzhypilsky.
The opera’s premiere in October 2021 marked a striking entry point into Ukraine’s new reality, both socio-political and artistic. It became the most resonant event in the new academic music of independent Ukraine – the first Ukrainian opera to use electronics and media art. The project restored a modernist vector of Ukrainian opera: montage-based arrangement of material, nonlinear presentation of content, mobile shifts in perspective and framing, and a polyphony of portrait and panoramic scenes.
As a leading figure in the electroacoustic strand of Ukrainian contemporary music, Alla Zagaykevych built her main expressive strategy on a combination of traditional vocal-orchestral writing and differentiated electronic sound. The free, flexible, nuanced interplay between acoustic and synthetic sound – converging and diverging across musical time, intersecting within a shared sound space – is one of the score’s clearest demonstrations of technical mastery.
This release is an audio recording of the premiere performance of Vyshyvanyi on October 2, 2021, at the Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Lysenko Theater.
Released as a double CD with a 36-page booklet, in two text versions – Ukrainian and English.
Listen, buy CD, or download:
https://ishallsinguntilmylandisfree.bandcamp.com/album/vyshyvanyi