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Ukrainian Bullets Young Ukrainian Artists at the Forefront of Art, Architecture, and Music

Ukrainian Bullets from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

With the war in Ukraine entering most people’s lives worldwide, Ukrainian Bullets shows creative alternatives from life before the beginning of the war. In delineating a short documentary, I focused on contemporary young artists at the forefront of art, music, and architecture.

Artists

 

Daria Marchenko graduated from Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design. She is best known for her involvement as an advocate for public art in Ukraine. She has created wall murals in over thirty countries. In “The Face of War,” she portrays Putin made from 5,000 bullet casings. Trump’s portrait “The Face of Money,” made together with Daniel Green, is made out of mostly pennies, nickels, and poker chips.

 

Pazza Pennello (b. 1987) is a Ukrainian pop artist born in Odessa. She lives in Kyiv. Her artworks are part of private collections in Ukraine, France, Switzerland, and the USA.

 

Alina Samanova (b. 1993) graduated from the University of the Arts in London. She lives in Kyiv. Her paintings depict both confident and vulnerable women in their chosen environment.

 

Stepan Ryabchenko was born in Odessa (b. 1987) in a family of artists. Hi graduated as an architect.

 

Musicians

 

Antonii Baryshevskyi is a pianist and composer. He was born (b. 1988) in Kyiv. He studied music at the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of Ukraine and at the École Supérieure de Musique in Paris.

 

DakhaBrakha is a Ukrainian folk quartet that combines the musical styles of several ethnic groups.

 

Dakh Daughters is a Ukrainian music and theater project started in 2012 in Kyiv. The band consists of seven women who play various instruments and sing in different languages (English, French, Russian, German) and dialects of Ukrainian. Dakh Daughters has performed in various Ukrainian cities and Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Russia, and Brazil. 

 

Go_A is a Ukrainian electro-folk band first formed in 2012 sent to represent Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 in Rotterdam, Netherlands (canceled due to COVID-19.)

 

Architects

 

SPRW Architects, based in Kyiv, with architect Vitaly Vorobey and designer Aleksey Zvoliansky, conceived “Flatness,” an art gallery.

 

With Piazzolla at the Bowl An Historic Event at the Hollywood Bowl Amphitheater

The concert of Astor Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas / The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, at the Hollywood Bowl, on August 26, 2021, was of historic importance. A public of about 15,000 people came to the concert conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, with the performance of Karen Gomio as a soloist.

Astor Piazzolla

Unlike Vivaldi’s concertos, Piazzolla’s Four Seasons wasn’t originally intended to be in four movements.  Piazzolla wrote the first of the four compositions, Summer (Verano Porteño) as a standalone work for Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz’s play The Mane of Gold (Melenita de oro). Autumn (Otoño Porteño), Spring (Primavera Porteña), and Winter (Invierno Porteño) came around five years later, in 1970. Piazzolla alludes to some of Vivaldi’s melodies in his own series, yet his composition is unique. The pieces were conceived for his quintet of violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass, and bandoneon, of which he was a virtuoso.

Piazzolla was not only one of the 20th century’s great musicians, but he was also one of the most prolific. His over 3,000 compositions include avant-garde tango music, opera, symphonic compositios, and music for film.

The concert at the Bowl brought the extraordinary performance of Karen Gomio, a musician born in Tokyo who developed her career in Montreal and New York. She now resides permanently in Berlin.

The coupling of Piazzolla’s Seasons with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 surprised me. It seems to me that the music of Bela Bartok, Stravinsky, Copland, and Gershwin are much closer to his spirit. And also the music of great jazz composers and performers, such as Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck.

In the film I included brief segments of interviews with some musicians that played with him for many years, such as Pablo Ziegler and Fernando Suárez Paz. To learn more about his complex life, Maria Susana Azzi’s detailed and knowledgeable biography is highly recommended, particularly the expanded new edition in Italian.

For brief a scheme of his life, you may watch my recent Piazzolla Con Brio film.

Hollywood Bowl Marquee

 

Piazzolla Con Brio Astor Piazzollas Music, Influences and its Reflection in Architecture

Many places around the world celebrate this year Astor Piazzolla’s centenary of his birth (1921-1992.) A full-page article published recently in the Los Angeles Times triggered some personal memories about my encounter with Piazzolla when I was seventeen years old. I decided to make a documentary on him, his music, his influence on some contemporary musicians, and some contextual background on Buenos Aires, the tango capital. I also included in the film some works of architecture conceived in a similar spirit to the one that inspired Piazzola’s music. “Piazzolla Con Brio” (Con Brio means in a vigorous or brisk manner in musical vocabulary) sound and images deliver the message more powerfully than this blog. Yet, I’ll bring here a few observations.

Piazzolla Con Brio Documentary – Poster

 

Buenos Aires’ Impact

 

“Three teachers influenced my music,” Piazzolla said. “Alberto Ginastera, Nadia Boulanger, and Buenos Aires.” Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) was a leading 20th-century Latin-American composer known for his use of local and national musical idioms in his compositions. Piazzolla, his first student, studied for six years with him. Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979,) conductor, organist, and one of the most influential teachers of musical composition of the 20th century, helped Piazzolla to find his voice. And Buenos Aires helped Piazzolla to become a Porteño, the way are called the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. 

 

Buenos Aires molds the identity of its inhabitants, who see themselves as more European than Latin American. Italy exerts the most potent cultural influence, but Buenos Aires is a complex place that includes great architecture, art and has more bookstores per habitant than any other city in the world. Its people are also passionate about soccer, meat, pizza, wine, ethnic food, and, yes, tango. 

 

As a young bandoneonist, Piazzolla started playing traditional tango in the orchestra of Anibal Troilo, a composer, arranger, and bandleader. However, studying with Ginastera, he abandoned the bandoneon and decided to become a symphonic composer. He returned to the tango as a source of inspiration following Nadia Boulanger’s advice. 

 

Although Piazzola spent many years of his life living in New York and Paris, Buenos Aires’ lifestyle exerted on his identity was crucial.

 

Buenos Aires’ Architecture 

 

The population of Greater Buenos Aires is today about 15,000,000. The capital consists of 48 official barrios or neighborhoods, many of these having a strong local identity. The city’s original architecture was strongly influenced by French and Italian neo-classical architecture. It evolved into Modernism under French architect Le Corbusier, who built many of his main works in exposed concrete. One of the city’s most prominent architects, Clorindo Testa (1923-2013,) about the same age as Piazzolla, designed and built two important buildings: the Bank of London, now called the Banco Hipotecario, completed in 1966, and the National Library, completed in 1992.

 

Two concepts characterize the uniqueness of the National Library. The first lies in the idea of the strength of the part that lifts the reading rooms above the ground, burying the deposits of books underground. The second concept lies in the strength and monumentality of the building in the vicinity of existing parks. 

 

A minor but poetic work I bring to the film is the Xul Solar Museum, designed by architect Pablo Tomas Beitia and completed in 1993. Alejandro Xul Solar (1887-1963) was an Argentinean painter, sculptor, and writer. The over one hundred years old building that faces the street was his residence. The renovation and expansion project was designed to interpret the particular artist’s pictorial world.

 

Floralis Genérica is a sculpture made of steel and aluminum, a gift of architect Eduardo Catalano (1917-2010). The sculpture was created in 2002. It was designed to move, closing its petals in the evening and opening them in the morning.

 

The former Grand Splendid Theater was designed by architects Peró and Torres Armengol and opened in 1919. In 2000 the building was subsequently renovated and converted into a book and music shop under the direction of architect Fernando Manzone. It’s been called the world’s most beautiful bookstore.

 

These five architectural examples relate to Piazzolla’s music in a number of ways. Clorindo Testa’s bank and library express energy and strength; the Xul Solar Museum and the Ateneo Grand Splendid bring a reinterpretation of the old with a new language; Floralis Generica tells of the creative interpretation of a flower.

 

Porteño

 

The film includes an abridged version of a poem I wrote in 1988, Porteño. It portrays how I then saw some aspects of my upbringing. You may read the unabridged version rolling down towards the end on http://meghiddoarchitects.com/selected-poems/ .

Astor Piazzolla