war and art

Recently, the National University was the scene of an event that deserves to be replicated in many places in Colombia and the world. Artists from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, the United Kingdom and Colombia paid a moving tribute to the victims of the war in Ukraine with the universal language of music.

From the great room of the University Art Museum and within the framework of an installation by the artist Óscar Murillo, which reflected the destruction of the war and the mourning that Ukraine suffers for its victims, the musicians joined in a cry for peace to the chords of their instruments. An excited audience listened to a musical profusion that ranged from the airs of the Colombian Caribbean bagpipes to the pieces of great classical music composers.

The sounds of the piano, the violin, the saxophone and the bagpipes filled the room in which art conveyed to the attendees for an hour and a half the shared feeling of horror, rage and impotence that peoples have always experienced under wars and that inspired writers, poets and composers throughout the ages to raise their voices against barbarism.

This was done by the pipers of the Caribbean Ensemble with a song of Colombian folklore, the Russian conductor Guerassim Voronkov and his wife, the Ukrainian violinist Ala Voronkova, and the Belarusian pianist Alena Krasutskaya interpreting compositions by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich alluding to the great wars suffered by Russia, such as that caused by the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the world wars. The Colombian Óscar Acevedo on piano and the German Jonathan Krause on saxophone also did so when interpreting a composition by Acevedo, and the violinist Voronkova when playing a work by Colombian Moisés Beltrán.

One of the highlights of the recital, which was made possible thanks to the alliance of the National University, the University of the Andes and the University of Ibagué, was the evocation of Babi Yar, the ravine on the outskirts of kyiv that was the scene of a of the largest massacres of Jews perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, an outrage that inspired a symphony by Shostakovich and a poem by another Russian artist, the poet Yevgueni Yevtushenko.

The sponsoring universities and the artists participating in this unique concert are deserving of general recognition for this initiative, which transcended the immediate purpose of sending a message to the Ukrainian people in the midst of their misfortune, to become a powerful universal instrument of pacification of the spirits. . The event enriched the hundreds of attendees and the innumerable spectators who were able to enjoy it on television. It fully corresponded to the definition that the Greeks gave to catharsis as the means of providing the purification of the passions through the emotions provoked by the evocation of tragedies.

Just as those that we Colombians have suffered and the one that Ukraine supports today identify us in misfortune, art transmits the message of peace better than any speech. The organizers of this magnificent event would do well to give it as much publicity as possible so that the Colombian public, immersed as it is in discord, receives the benefits of the healing language of music.

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