For more than two decades, young musicians from all over the world have been meeting as part of the Campus project, organized by the Beethoven Festival and the media company Deutsche Welle. This year, on September 8, a special meeting will take place: musicians who left Belarus will gather together with colleagues from Ukraine and Germany.
“Project Campus is a performance like no other,” says Beethoven Festival representative and Campus 2022 project coordinator Thomas Scheider. everything in this project needs to be thought through literally from scratch: who to invite, why, what goes together, and what doesn’t go so well that it even becomes interesting.”
Campus-2022 will also take place in a special place – this is the first and only concert in the history of the Beethoven Festival, which will be held in the former plenary hall of the Bundestag, figuratively speaking, right on the stage of post-war German democracy.
Musical bridge between cultures
This time Beethoven’s music will be supplemented by vocal works by Ukrainian, Belarusian and German composers – from folklore to the present. Songs of freedom and protest, as well as hymns of peace, will be performed along with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony, “Heroic”, permeated with the idea of revolutionary struggle and the spirit of a new era. “Of course, Beethoven’s music is a real art, but there is something so direct and emotional in it that it is immediately transmitted to the public,” says project leader Scheider. “Of course it’s not a folk song, but I think Beethoven will hook the listeners too.”
“The goal of this project is to create a musical bridge between the cultures of Belarus, my homeland Ukraine, which we all support, and Germany,” says the musical director of the project, conductor Vitaly Alekseyonok. “From the past to the present, from the works of Russian poets and composers of the 19th and 20 centuries to the works of contemporary composers of the three countries… With the help of art and music, we can achieve a lot. We want to show that we – Belarusians and Ukrainians – are and want to remain part of Europe, part of free thinking.” Vitaly Alekseyonok was a participant in the protests in Minsk in the summer of 2020, about which he published the book “White Days of Minsk” in Germany, and therefore can no longer return to his homeland.
A similar fate has many other Belarusian musicians participating in the project. For example, the singers of the “Free Choir”. Through its spontaneous performances and flash mobs in public, the choir became a symbol of peaceful protest in Belarus, but after the brutal crackdown on the movement by the Lukashenka regime, it was declared a “hostile organization.” Most of the members of the choir had to flee. The Free Choir will come to Bonn with its leader Galina Kazimirovskaya, who currently lives in Poland. “When we fled two years ago, we all hoped that we would soon be able to return home,” admits Galina Kazimirovskaya. “But so far it has not worked out – in Belarus we are threatened with arrest and several years in prison. But we continue to fight, singing our songs.”
Ukraine will be represented by the chamber choir “Sofia” from Kyiv. “We see ourselves as ambassadors of Ukrainian culture,” Oleksiy Shamrytsky, head of the choir, told DW. “At the beginning of the war, we sang to frightened people in bomb shelters. Now we want to show our fighting spirit to the whole world.”
Another participant in the program is the “GewandhausJugendchor” choir from Leipzig, directed by Frank-Steffen Elster. During the preparation of the project, all three choirs from Belarus, Ukraine and Germany rehearsed together in Warsaw.
Campus 2022 Program: Together with Beethoven
The project will be presented to the public in Bonn on 8 September. The performances of the choir, consisting of singers from three countries, will be held in one program with the performance of Beethoven’s 3rd symphony. Various versions of this work will be performed in chamber arrangements written by four authors from different eras – from the time of Beethoven to the present day. One of them, the third part, was written by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiets. The works of the program will be performed by Belarusian, Ukrainian and German musicians, including members of the Federal Youth Orchestra of Germany.
The centerpiece of the program is traditionally the performance of a special piece of music commissioned by DW. This year, the composer Olga Podgayskaya, who fled from Minsk, took up the cause. She wrote a work for choir and orchestra called Mary’s Heaven. It is dedicated to the musician and oppositionist Maria Kolesnikova, who knows the composer well from their joint studies at the Minsk Conservatory. Kolesnikova is known in the musical environment as a flutist and project initiator. She later joined a political movement seeking democratic change in Belarus. Two years ago, Kolesnikova was arrested and sentenced by the Lukashenka regime to eleven years in prison. “When you think about where Maria is now and in what position, one can only cry,” says Podgaiskaya, who now lives in Warsaw. “Because evil has a paralyzing effect, it freezes any creative impulse. But this is exactly what cannot be allowed. In order to survive, we have to be strong and support each other.”
Kolesnikova’s sister Tatiana Khomich visited the rehearsals of the student choir in Warsaw and thanked all the project participants: “Maria knows about the project and the work dedicated to it, and it touches her very much. a flute in prison, but, of course, they could not. But she will see your “Heaven” even behind bars. “