Solomiya Krushelnytska, a legend of Ukrainian opera, is widely known not only to specialists, but also to a wide range of admirers of classic art.
However, it has been only recently that Ukrainian musicologists have begun to study the creative personality of another world-known artist - pianist Lubka Kolessa (1902-1997). She was one of the biggest classic music stars of the 1920-1930s.
She played with the most outstanding conductors of her time and on the world's most prestigious stages (Berlin, Zurich, New York, Rio-de-Janeiro, Warsaw, Sofiya, Kyiv, L'viv...). Contemporary Ukrainian musicologists now call her the "Prima Donna of the Century".
Lubka Kolessa's name, however, was consciously kept in silence in her Fatherland for most of her career. The principal reason for this was the fact that Lubka Kolessa lived all her "conscious" life in the land of the "enemy" - the West.
First she lived in Europe, where her family had moved from L'viv due to her father's - Oleksandr Kolessa - assignment as an ambassador to the Austrian parliament. Later she moved from Europe to Canada.
The father of the future pianist was a famous public figure. He came from the well-known Kolessa family of L'viv. Many representatives of this family were great personalities. The most famous of them was Filaret Kolessa, the ethnographer, and his son, the composer Mykola Kolessa, who still lives in L'viv. It's worth mentioning that while living abroad Lubka Kolessa performed everywhere presenting herself as a pianist from Ukraine.
The musician made a lot of sound recordings in the 1930s in Germany and England and later in the U.S.A. and Canada, where she often performed on radio.
Recently, for the first time in the world, a three-CD set with performances of the famous Ukrainian pianist was released. Unfortunately, it did not come out in her Fatherland.
This three-CD set was released by the Canadian sound recording company "Doremi", whose activities are devoted to the preservation of famous historical musical landmarks.
As encyclopedias state, classic works are pieces of art that have received worldwide recognition and have passed the test of time. Lubka Kolessa was recognized and popular in the whole world and now, more than half a century later, her work has received confirmation that her creativity is of the class of high art.
The three-CD set of Lubka Kolessa's performances came out in the series titled "Legendary Treasury", which had previously included works of such master performers as Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Hilels, Otto Klemperer, Mstislav Rostropovich, Jascha Heifetz and others.
This release of Lubka Kolessa's CD set is a prominent event for Ukrainians. It represents our lucky opportunity to touch history, to salute high art that had previously gone unrecognized not because the art had been hidden or overlooked because of "the dust of time", but due to ideological reasons alone.
On the disks there are studio sound recordings and radiobroadcast recordings of pianoforte concerts written by Ludvig van Beethoven (performed by Lubka Kolessa in 1939) and Mozart (recording made in 1936). The concerts are conducted by Karl Bem and Max Fielder. Also recorded on the disk are solo performances of works by Frederic Chaupin, Iohann Hummel, Ferenc Liszt, Johann Brahms, Robert Schumann and Johann Strauss.
The three CDs' total recording time is three hours and twenty minutes. This represents the greater part of existing sound recordings of the pianist's performances. It also presents amateur (unprofessional) recordings still unknown in Ukraine (works of Ferenc Liszt and Frederic Chaupin).
The 25 works recorded on the three disks present a great variety of the repertoire of the pianist and provide quite a complete representation of her creative personality.
The quality of the recordings is not equal. The non-professional recordings are not of the same quality as the ones done professionally. After all, there are many lovers of such "exotic", "non-refined" sounds. And though the quality of the sound recording equipment of that time fail to perfectly reproduce the performances, still there exists "a link" - though old records produce woolly sounds, still the "living, breathing" effects of that era reaches us.
Though sound recordings of pianoforte music can't compete with first-hand, in-person enchantment, charm or daintiness of the beautiful music of Lubka Kolessa, we still feel very well about the performances.
The qualities that disarmed the critics - as well as the contemporaries of the pianist: her bright individuality is evident. Her interpretation of the works carries us away and charms us, even though in our times we were brought up in a completely different music environment.
The music of Frederic Chaupin, whose works were an avocation of the pianist, sounds exquisitely charming. We wax a little bit nostalgically in the waltzes; in mazurkas, his music sounds like a dance, somewhat like "a drawing-room style", though the music is performed with an excellent sense of taste. High music culture is felt in the performances of Mozart's works - the pianist perceives the music of this composer sincerely and joyfully, like a kid. And due to this, there is improvisation and ease to the music in her interpretation. And how beautifully the instrument sounds in her hands!
Once talking to one of her students, Lubka Kolessa cried out: "Don't contemporary pianists know that one has to sing Mozart's music?"
In her performances Lubka Kolessa interprets Beethoven's music not in a courageous, but more in a lyrical way. And when she plays Johann Hummel's "Rondo" we are amazed with her real artistic talent - the music work sounds "gracefully", coquettishly. In 1925 Volodymyr Barvinskiy, a reviewer of her music, wrote that the charm and mystery of her talent would have to remain unexpressed in words. It's better to listen to "the poetess of pianoforte" - Lubka Kolessa.
A folded booklet is enclosed with the three CD set. The booklet contains rather broad information about the artistic personality of Lubka Kolessa - her autobiography is a short review of her art citing different reviewers, recollections of her students, rare wonderful photographs of the pianist and copies of programs of her concerts. One can only envy music lovers living in Canada since the issue of release of Lubka Kolessa's disk will probably remain rhetorical.
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