New York, 24 Feb. The Met Opera in New York filled the almost 4,000 seats of its hall at Lincoln Center on Friday in a “concert of memory and hope” for Ukraine held exactly when today marks one year of the war in the European country.
Before starting the concert -which was broadcast on radio free to the whole world-, the Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, addressed the attendees in a recorded video message and reminded them that today marks “one year of heroism and sacrifice that we Ukrainians demonstrate on a daily basis”.
Zelenska also thanked the contribution of the Met Opera, which together with the Polish National Orchestra set up the Ukraine Freedom Orchestra, made up of musicians from that country, many of them refugees, and which has staged a great tour of the United States and Europe.
The concert began with the Ukrainian anthem, before which all attendees rose to their feet, and also ended with Valentin Silvestrov’s “Prayer for Ukraine,” an emotional piece sung by the Met Opera Choir.
The central part of the concert consisted of two carefully chosen pieces: first, Mozart’s Requiem was played, in honor of the thousands of soldiers fallen on the battlefield and the countless ordinary Ukrainians killed, wounded, displaced or deprived, as he put it. Met director Peter Gelb.
But not to stay in the tragic tone of grief, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony came next, “a moving symbol of the victory to come and with which we revive a tradition that the Allies began in World War II,” Gelb recalled. .
It was the spirited interpretation of the Fifth under the baton of Yannick Nézet Seguin, and in particular the last movement, which drew the most applause from the audience that filled a room where the box of honor was reserved for the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell , and the ambassadors of the United States and Ukraine to the UN.
At the end of the concert, the two male soloists Dmytro Popov (tenor) and Vladyslav Buialsky (bass baritone), both of Ukrainian origin, left to return to the stage wrapped in two huge flags of their country, in one of the most emotional moments of the evening.
As happened on March 14, when the Met Opera organized its first massive concert for Ukraine, the entire facade of Lincoln Center was illuminated with the blue and yellow colors of that country’s flag.
As a gesture of support for Ukraine, the Met Opera suspended its relations with the Russian Bolshoi Theater and also restricted contacts with musicians or institutions that have expressed support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EFE
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