A lone surma, a Ukrainian folk trumpet, blares a Cossack military call. It is followed by the pounding of lytavras, or Cossack kettledrums. Another surma joins in to repeat the call, raising to a final note that brings to life a whole orchestra of Ukrainian folk instruments — banduras, kobzas, tsymbalys and many others.
The music is the Zaporizhian March by the Ukrainian National Academic Orchestra of Folk Instruments, or NAONI. Its first conductor Viktor Hutsal arranged the march for the orchestra in 1970, but was sacked by the Soviet authorities for performing it.
“I was fired because the march had such a great powerful force,” he says.
Fifty years after NAONI’s formation, Hutsal conducted the march at the start of the orchestra’s anniversary concert, bringing the audience to a standing ovation.
Most of them are admirers of the Ukrainian folk and classical music tradition that NAONI has carried on, through rain and shine. But there are others who have discovered the orchestra because of its collaboration with modern artists.
NAONI’s guest act performance with electro-folk band Onuka at Eurovision Song Contest 2017 in Kyiv has been watched over 5 million times on YouTube, highlighting how Ukrainian folk instruments, like trembitas, sopilkas and buhay, can be used in tandem with modern electronic music.
“Nobody had heard anything like it,” Hutsal says. “And then the whole world saw it — the expression, the vividness, the beauty!”
Soviet heritage
Ukraine was the third largest republic of the Soviet Union but one of the last to get its own orchestra of national folk instruments. Hutsal says that this way the Russian Soviet authorities tried to suppress Ukraine’s national identity.
Instead, the Soviet authorities opened departments of Russian folk instruments in Ukrainian schools and sent Russian folk orchestras on tours to Ukraine to play on balalaika, gusli and bayan. Hutsal himself started playing music on the domra, a string instrument generally considered to be Russian.
When the Ukrainian orchestra of folk instruments finally came to be, it was no thanks to the Soviet state. It was created in 1969 by the Musical and Choral Society, a non-governmental organization of musicians and composers limited in powers by the Communist Party. The new ensemble was to be called the Kyiv Orchestra of Ukrainian Folk Instruments.
Hutsal conducted the orchestra’s first concert on April 12, 1970, presenting the Zaporizhian March that he arranged for orchestra from the song by Yevhen Adamtsevych, a blind folk musician that played the bandura, the iconic Ukrainian plucked string instrument. The orchestra’s version was a hit.
“We played an encore at every concert. In Moscow, we played it three times encore — can you imagine? The authorities saw how it lifted the spirit and inspired people to struggle, so they banned it,” Hutsal says.
Viktor Hutsal, the artistic director and chief conductor of the NAONI orchestra, oversees a rehearsal for a joint performance with the German heavy metal band Accept. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
The Communist Party said the march had similarities to the songs of the Sichovi Striltsi, the army unit of the Ukrainian People’s Republic that fought against the Bolshevik armies in 1917–1918. The march was erased from all tape recordings, and Hutsal was removed from the orchestra.
After the rule of Leonid Brezhnev ended in the early 1980s, the orchestra was appropriated by the state and given the status of a republican orchestra. Hutsal returned as the orchestra’s artistic director in 1984, a post that he still occupies today.
A year later, under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, the orchestra re-recorded the march and has played it at its concerts ever since.
In 1997, six years after Ukraine declared independence, the orchestra received national status and a new name — the National Academic Orchestra of Folk Instruments.
Modern legacy
From its creation in 1969, NAONI’s underlying goal was playing Ukrainian instrumental folk music, says Hutsal.
The Soviet authorities, however, wanted the orchestra to promote Communist internationalism by having them travel to all the Soviet republics and add Communist songs to their shows.
“We started a concert with playing ‘The Ballad About Lenin.’ It’s a fact, and there’s no way around it. But we outlived it, thank God,” Hutsal says.
With Ukraine’s independence, NAONI gained more artistic freedom, but lost extensive touring possibilities. The orchestra still occasionally travels around Ukraine and abroad, but needs more funding to tour more often and cover wider areas.
“We were in Crimea and the Donbas just a few times. The troubles there are the result of our inaction. We should’ve shown our culture there. Instead, Russia propagated its Russkiy Mir (Russian World) ideology with Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra twice a year,” says Hutsal.
For Hutsal, spreading Ukrainian culture has become NAONI’s new goal. And the state should be the one to finance the touring, he says.
One goal in which NAONI has made significant progress is in attracting younger listeners. Instead of waiting for young people to come to their concerts, the orchestra started coming to universities to perform in front of students in Kyiv. They also invited schoolchildren to see NAONI at its rehearsal room. Young people then come themselves to attend their shows, Hutsal says.
The orchestra also keeps bringing in new musicians who want to play folk instruments. It has seen generations of musicians come and go. What started as an ensemble of seasoned folk musicians is now an orchestra of young academically educated professionals. Hutsal at 75 is the oldest of its members.
Having progressive and skilled musicians has prompted NAONI to experiment. They started working with Ukrainian artists like Oleg Skrypka and rock band Druha Rika. NAONI’s latest collaboration is with the German heavy metal band Accept.
At their 50th anniversary concert, NAONI performed a Crimean-Tatar song with Jamala, the Ukrainian winner of Eurovision in 2016. People were in tears, Hutsal says, when the folk traditions of Ukrainians and the long-suffered ingenious peoples of Crimea combined in a song.
“Our orchestra has a unique tone color,” Hutsal says. “And when we add the bouquet of our folk instruments to the flower of the artist’s performance… the result is just beautiful.”
