THE 2024 BEETHOVEN NINTH FREEDOM TOUR 

Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra 2024 Beethoven Ninth Freedom Tour will take in some of the great cathedrals and concert halls of Europe and the United States and will feature Beethoven’s glorious symphony in a unique Ukrainian language version to reassert the values of freedom, resistance, and progress against the forces of oppression in the 200th anniversary year of the symphony’s composition.

The tour will include concerts at Saint-Eustache Church in Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympics, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City as well as performances in Washington, D.C., Warsaw, and a special concert in the Polish shipyard that was instrumental in the birth of the Solidarity movement.

The Orchestra’s performance version of Schiller’s great cry of liberty, “Ode to Joy,” sung by the soloists and chorus in Ukrainian, and captured in the recent Deutsche Grammophon recording, follows in the tradition of another remarkable cultural and historical gesture. On Christmas Day 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the city and made one important change to the text. Bernstein altered Schiller’s opening word “Freude” (Joy) to “Freiheit” (Freedom) and in so doing defined a moment of hope in German, and world, history. In making her performance version, Keri-Lynn Wilson, working with her Ukrainian musical colleague Ievgeniia Iermachkova, changed “Freude” to “Slava” (Glory), from the phrase that has become familiar around the world as the rallying call of Ukrainian resistance in the face of ruthless Russian aggression, Slava Ukraini! (Glory to Ukraine!). “The decision to sing Schiller’s great text in Ukrainian was an important artistic and wider cultural statement for us,” explains Wilson. ”Putin is literally trying to silence a nation. We will not be silenced.” 

The special concert in the the dramatic setting of the CRIST Gydnia shipyard in Gdansk Bay, Poland - a region synonymous with struggle for freedom and self-determination in the face of despotism - will be held under the honorary patronage of former President of Poland, founder of Solidarity and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa, who has been a staunch champion of the Ukrainian people in their moment of need. The soloists for the tour will be Ukrainian singers Olga Bezsmertna (soprano), Nataliia Kukhar (mezzosoprano), Valentyn Dytiuk (tenor), and Andrii Kymach (bass-baritone). The orchestra will be joined by local choirs at each venue with links to the wider Ukrainian community, including at St Paul’s Cathedral in London with the Royal Opera House’s Songs for Ukraine chorus, which is made up of Ukrainian refugees and members of the Ukrainian London diaspora affected by the war, as well as members of the Royal Opera chorus.

Each concert will open with a work by renowned contemporary Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Polevá entitled “Bucha Lacrimosa”, a piece created in memory of the innocent victims massacred at the hands of Russian invaders in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in 2022. As part of the 2024 tour, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra will also embark on a new initiative in working alongside the Baltic Opera Festival to present two fully staged performances of Puccini’s Turandot. Both performances will be conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson in the spectacular open-air surroundings of the Opera Leśna in Sopot on the Baltic coast, one of the largest amphitheaters in Europe.