WARSAW — After years of struggling to earn a living as musicians in Ukraine, Yevgen Dovbysh and Anna Vikhrova felt they had finally built a stable life. They were husband-and-wife performers in the Odessa Philharmonic – he plays the cello, she plays the violin – and shared a love for Bach partitas and the music from ‘Star Wars’. They lived in an apartment on the shores of the Black Sea with their 8-year-old daughter, Daryna.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Vikhrova fled to the Czech Republic with her daughter and mother, with a few hundred dollars in savings, some clothes and her violin. Dovbysh, 39, who was not allowed to leave because he is of military age, stayed behind and assisted in attempts to defend the city, collect sand from beaches to strengthen barriers and protect monuments and play Ukrainian music on videos in honor of the the soldiers of the country.
“We spent every day together,” said Vikhrova, 38. “We did everything together. And suddenly our beautiful life was taken away.”
Dovbysh received special permission last month to leave the country to join the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, a new ensemble of 74 musicians meeting in Warsaw, the first stop on an international tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture and denounce the Russian invasion. With his cello in hand and a small gold cross around his neck, he boarded a bus to Poland. He was looking forward to playing for the cause and also to be reunited with another member of the young ensemble: his wife.
“I love my country so much,” he said as the bus passed ponds, churches and raspberry fields in Hrebenne, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine. “I don’t have a gun, but I have my cello.”
When his bus arrived in Warsaw, he rushed to meet Vikhrova. He knocked on her hotel room door, waited nervously, and hugged her as she opened it. She teased him about his decision to wear shorts for the 768-mile journey despite the cool weather, a legacy of his upbringing in sultry Odessa. She gave him a statuette of a “Star Wars” creature, Baby Yoda, as a belated birthday present.
“I’m so happy,” he said. “Finally we’re almost a family again.”
The next morning, they joined the new Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, led by Canadian Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, to prepare for a 12-city tour to rally support for Ukraine. The tour kicks off here in Warsaw and has continued in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities, and will travel to the United States this week to play at Lincoln Center on August 18-19 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington on august 20.
The tour is organized with the support of the Ukrainian government. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a recent statement honoring the orchestra’s founding that “artistic resistance” against Russia was paramount. The orchestra also has the backing of powerful figures in the music industry. Wilson’s husband, Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has played a pivotal role in organizing engagements and benefactors, and the Met helped arrange the tour. Waldemar Dabrowski, the director of the Wielki Theater, Warsaw’s opera house, provided rehearsal space and helped obtain financial support from the Polish government.
CULTURE, MOVED A series about the life and work of artists who have been driven far from their homeland amid the growing global refugee crisis.
At the first rehearsal, musicians poured into the Wielki theater with blue and yellow bags; instrument cases covered with peace signs and hearts; and torn parts of Ukrainian poems and hymns.
When the musicians began to warm up during rehearsal, Wilson took her place on stage, closed eyes with the players and spoke about the need to stand up to Moscow.
“For Ukraine!” she said, throwing her fist in the air. Then the orchestra began to play Dvorak.
The musicians had usually arrived as strangers to each other. But slowly they grew closer and shared stories of neighborhoods that had been bombed, while the refugees among them shared their long, tense journeys across crowded borders this winter.
Among the violins was Iryna Solovei, a member of the orchestra of the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, who fled to Warsaw with her 14-year-old daughter at the beginning of the invasion. Since March, they have been among more than 30 Ukrainian refugees living in the Wielki Theater, in offices converted into dormitories.
In March, Solovei watched from a distance as her home in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian missiles. She shared photos of her charred living room with her co-stars, telling them how much she missed Ukraine and worried about her husband, who still plays with the Kharkiv ensemble.
Our coverage of the war between Russia and Ukraine
“Everyone is injured,” she said. “Some people have been physically injured. Some people have lost their jobs. Some people have lost their homes.”
She reminisced about her days as an orchestral musician in Ukraine and the deep connections she felt with the audience there. To cope with the war trauma, she takes walks in a park in Warsaw, where a Ukrainian guitarist plays folk songs at sunset.
“The war is like a horrific dream,” she added. “We can forget it for a while, but we can never escape it.”
At the back of the orchestra, in the percussion section, was Yevhen Ulianov, a 33-year-old member of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.
His daughter was born on February 24, the first day of the invasion. He told his fellow players how he and his wife, a singer, had gone to the hospital in Kiev a few hours before the war broke out. While she was in labor, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly and at one point they were rushed from the maternity ward to the hospital basement.
“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” he said. “All I could think was, ‘How are we going to get out of here alive?'”
Ulianov did not play for two months after the invasion, as concerts in Kiev were canceled and theaters elsewhere were damaged. The orchestra cut his salary by a third in April and he relied on savings to pay his bills. In his apartment near the center of town, he practiced on a vibraphone and took shelter in a hallway when the air raid sirens sounded.
“We didn’t know what to do – should we stay or should we leave?” he said. “What if the Russian army came to Kiev? Could we ever play football again?”
“Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.”
Before the orchestra’s first concert, late last month in Warsaw, Vikhrova and Dovbysh were concerned.
They had spent more than a week rehearsing the program, which featured pieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer. But they didn’t know how the public would react. And they struggled with their fears about the war.
Vikhrova and their daughter had tried to build a new life in the Czech Republic by joining a local orchestra. But she was concerned for her husband’s safety “every second, every minute, every hour,” she said. She slept near her phone so she would be awakened by warnings about air strikes in Odessa. She became anxious after an attack there before Easter, when her husband saw Russian missiles in the sky, but had no time to take shelter. To take her mind off the war, she played Bach and traditional Ukrainian songs.
Holding her husband’s hand backstage, Vikhrova said she longed for the day when they could return to Ukraine with their daughter, who stayed with her mother in the Czech Republic for the duration of the tour.
“I feel like I’m living a double life,” she said. “Half of me is in Ukraine, and half of me is outside.”
Dovbysh recalled the fear in his daughter’s eyes when she and her mother left Odessa in February. He remembered taking the time to explain the war and tell her she would be safe. He promised that they would see each other again soon.
When the tour ends this week and his military exemption expires, he is scheduled to return to Odessa. It is unclear when he will be able to see his family again.
“Every day,” he said, “I dream of the moment when we can see each other again.”
“We live with a constant sense of concern.”
As the war continues, the musicians sometimes struggle to maintain their focus. They spend much of their free time checking their phones for news of Russian attacks and sending alerts to family members.
Marko Komonko, 46, the orchestra’s concertmaster, said it was painful to watch the war from a distance, comparing the experience to a parent caring for a sick child. In March he fled Ukraine to Sweden, where he now plays in the orchestra of the Royal Opera House in Stockholm.
“We live with a constant sense of concern,” he said.
More than two months after the invasion, he said, he felt nothing when he played his violin. Then, in early May, he began to feel a mixture of sadness and hope as he performed a Ukrainian folk melody at a concert in Stockholm.
For some, playing in the orchestra has enhanced a sense of Ukrainian identity. Alisa Kuznetsova, 30, was in Russia when the war started; since 2019 she has worked as a violinist in the Mariinsky Orchestra. In late March, she resigned from the orchestra in protest and moved to Tallinn, Estonia, where she began playing in the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.
When she joined the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, she initially felt guilty, she said, worried that the other players would see her as a traitor because of her work in Russia. But she said her colleagues assured her she was welcome.
“For my soul, for my heart,” she said, “this has been very important.”
In European capitals of culture, the orchestra has been greeted with standing ovations and positive reviews from critics.
“A stirring show of Ukrainian resistance,” wrote a review in The Daily Telegraph of the orchestra’s performance at the Proms, the BBC’s classical music festival. The Guardian wrote of “tears and roars of delight” for the new ensemble.
But the musicians say the measure of success won’t be the reviews, but their ability to shine a light on Ukraine and show a cultural identity that Russia has tried to erase.
Nazarii Stets, 31, a Kiev double bassist, has redoubled his efforts to build a digital library of Ukrainian composers’ scores so that their music can be widely downloaded and performed. He plays in the Kyiv Kamerata, a national ensemble dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian music.
“If we don’t fight for culture,” he said, “what’s the point of fighting?”
Wilson, who came up with the idea for the orchestra in March and plans to revive it next summer, said she made it a point to use Silvestrov’s symphony as a way to promote Ukrainian culture. Towards the end of the piece, the composer wrote a series of breathing sounds for the brass, an effect intended to mimic his wife’s last breaths.
Wilson, who dedicated the piece to the Ukrainians who died in the war, said she instructed the orchestra not to see the sounds as dead, but as life.
“It’s the breath of life, to show that their spirit continues,” she said in an interview.
Vikhrova said the tour had brought her closer to her husband and her fellow players. She cries after every performance of the Silvestrov Symphony and when the orchestra plays an arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem as an encore.
“This has connected our hearts,” she said. “We feel part of something bigger than ourselves.”
Anna Tsybko contributed reporting.