Following its acclaimed 2022 and 2023 tours, The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra assembles again under the baton of its Canadian-Ukrainian Music Founder and Music Director Keri-Lynn Wilson for a tour of great cathedrals and concert halls of Europe and the United States in a continuing demonstration of Ukrainian artistry as the nation fights for its freedom.

In the 200th anniversary year of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the orchestra will present its acclaimed and emotionally charged version of the work with the unique feature of its choral text, Schiller’s great cry of freedom, resistance, and progress against the forces of oppression in the form of his poem “Ode to Joy,” sung by the soloists and chorus in Ukrainian.

Under the patronage of Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska, The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra will again bring together leading musicians based in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and elsewhere in Ukraine alongside Ukrainian musicians forced into exile by the war and Ukrainian members of European orchestras.

Each concert will open with a new work by acclaimed Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Polevá entitled Bucha Lacrimosa. The piece is the latest in a series of responses to the invasion composed by Polevá, and it was composed in memory of the innocent victims massacred at the hands of Russian invaders in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022.

Program:

Victoria Vita Polevá: Bucha Lacrimosa

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9