LOS ANGELES — The first week of May, I attended four concerts. All four, whether by chance or intent, had a connection with Ukraine. That was obvious the first day of May at a benefit concert for Ukraine put on by the Wende Museum and Jacaranda Music at the Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City. And while Ukrainian-American pianist Inna Faliks’ Ukraine-centric recital several days later at the Wende contained no Ukrainian music, its programmatic theme was the novel “Master and Margarita” by the Ukrainian-born author Mikhail Bulgakov.
In between those two concerts, a pair of concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall were seemingly unrelated to Ukraine. No mention was made of Ukraine or Russia’s invasion at a piano recital by Daniil Trifonov or at the first of Gustavo Dudamel’s two-week Los Angeles Philharmonic series combining Stravinsky’s early ballets with Latin American music. But the performances were, indeed, indebted to the besieged country so much on our minds.
Trifonov, the 31-year-old Russian star pianist who lives in New York, had planned his program well before Russia lined up its tanks on the Ukrainian border last winter. He began with the Third Piano Sonata by Karol Szymanowski, the great Polish composer of the first half of the 20th century who inspired a modern nationalist Polish musical style. It turns out Szymanowski was born in Ukraine.
