NOn the other hand, he doesn’t want to hear or speak Russian, says Volodymyr Sirenko, chief conductor of the Ukrainian State National Orchestra, when we meet him after the rehearsal in Wiesbaden’s Kurhaus. The numerous Ukrainian refugees who were invited to this concert as part of the orchestra’s month-long tour of Europe converse in Russian; they mostly come from the eastern parts of the country. But when talking to the FAZ, the maestro prefers to have the questions translated into Ukrainian and his answers back into German by a musician who studied in Germany.
The musical performance with which he presented his country’s top orchestra was of course determined by the war, explains the 62-year-old Sirenko, it is an inalienable part of the Ukrainian struggle for freedom. And the energy, the precision, the coordination with which the instrumentalists will actually conquer the audience should also reflect what the Ukrainian armed forces achieve in their defensive battle against the Russian invaders.
