Mykola Kolessa
Mykola Kolessa was a Ukrainian composer, symphonic, opera, and choral conductor, music educator, and public figure. He was born on December 6, 1903, in Sambir, then in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary; some sources give 1904 as his birth year. He died on June 8, 2006, in Lviv and was buried at Lychakiv Cemetery.
Kolessa studied at the Mykola Lysenko Higher Music Institute in Lviv from 1913 to 1914 and from 1917 to 1924. From 1914 to 1917 he lived in Vienna, where he attended a secondary school and took private piano lessons. He later studied at the private school of the Italian pianist Marietta de Gelli. In 1922 and 1923 he attended the medical faculty of Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
In 1924 he entered Charles University in Prague, studying philosophy and Slavic studies and attending musicology lectures by Zdeněk Nejedlý. At the same time, he studied harmony with Fedir Yakymenko and conducting with Platonyda Shchurovska-Rosinevych at the Mykhailo Drahomanov Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute. In 1925 he entered the composition and conducting department of the Prague Conservatory, where he studied composition with Otakar Šín and conducting with Otakar Ostrčil and Pavel Dědeček. He graduated in 1928 and continued his composition studies with Vítězslav Novák at the Prague Master School from 1928 to 1931.
After returning to Lviv, Kolessa taught at the Mykola Lysenko Higher Music Institute from 1931. From 1940 he taught at the Mykola Lysenko Lviv Conservatory, becoming an associate professor that year and a professor in 1957. He served as the conservatory's rector from 1953 to 1965, headed its conducting department from 1965 to 1974, and then worked there as a consulting professor. From 1942 to 1944 he taught at a music school.
Kolessa co-founded and conducted the Lviv Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in 1939–1941 and 1944–1953. From 1944 to 1947 he conducted the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theatre, and from 1946 to 1948 he was artistic director and chief conductor of the Trembita Choral Chapel. He also led the Lviv and Stryi Boyans choirs, the Bandurist choir, the Ukrainian Studio Choir, and the Dumka choir in Stanislav, now Ivano-Frankivsk. He toured cities of the Soviet Union and made recordings on gramophone records and compact discs.
Kolessa composed symphonic, choral, chamber, piano, organ, vocal, and theatrical music, much of it based on national melodic material. His works include the First Symphony, the Second Symphony, the Ukrainian Suite, Variations, the string-orchestra suite In the Mountains, the piano suites Little Things, Passacaglia, Scherzo and Fugue, and Pictures of the Hutsul Region, as well as the organ Prelude and Fugue. His choral music includes A Joyful Day, Our Banner Is Glorious, the triptych Song of the Hutsul Girl Olena and the Partisan Kovpak, The Sun of Freedom Has Risen, and Oh, Green Bukovina.
He wrote songs and romances, including the cycles In the Land of Flowering Cherries and Children's Dreams, and arranged Lemko, Volhynian, Polesian, Hutsul, Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian folk songs. His vocal-instrumental cycle Lemko Wedding, written for choir and string quartet in 1937 and revised in 1967, received the 1983 State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR named after Taras Shevchenko. His music was performed in Germany, Poland, the United States, and Canada during the 1960s–1990s, and author concerts took place in the United States and Canada in 1994 and 1996. He also wrote music for stage productions and films, including Ivan Franko (1956), jointly with Borys Lyatoshynsky.
Kolessa wrote educational and methodological works on conducting, including The Fundamentals of Conducting Technique, Conducting, Training the Student Conductor in the Specialized Class, Arrangements of Ukrainian Folk Songs, and Differentiated Gestures in Conducting. He was a member of the Union of Composers of Ukraine from 1940 and chaired its Lviv branch from 1983 to 1988. He became a full member of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine in 1997. His distinctions included the titles People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR and People's Artist of the USSR, awarded in 1972 and 1991 respectively. The Lviv Music School No. 2 bears his name, and a monument was installed at his grave in 2013.