Under the lofty dome of the Grand Palais on Monday night, Ukraine had its first triumph at the Paris Olympics: Olha Kharlan dedicated her bronze fencing medal to her embattled homeland. The same evening, under a different soaring dome, that of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra and 180 singers of the UK-based Songs for Ukraine Chorus united to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in the year of the work’s 200th anniversary. The choral finale was sung not in Schiller’s original German but in Ukrainian. “Freude” (joy) was replaced with “slava” (glory). Flags were waved, “Slava Ukraini” cried on both sides of the Channel. The two soft powers of sports and culture united in obliging synchronicity.
At St Paul’s, filled to capacity, the atmosphere was heady, familial, talkative. Many, on stage and off, wore traditional embroidered white shirts. When the Ukrainian ambassador gave a welcome address from the pulpit, the noisy cheers were a reminder of his national hero status: General Valerii Zaluzhnyi was commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces until February 2024. The chorus’s first Ode to Joy utterance, Slavic vowel sounds adding a rich and unfamiliar aural filter, provoked applause mid-movement, together with a light show of phones held high: potent memories to send home. The concert opened with Bucha. Lacrimosa, a short, affecting work by the Ukrainian Victoria Vita Polevá (b.1962), written in response to the massacre there in April 2022. A solo violin (Marko Komonko) releases curls of notes into the cavernous space, until thuds of war, percussive and chilling, ambush the peace.
