Ukho Ensemble Kyiv

Ensembles

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv is seventeen Ukrainian musicians and an American concertmaster Rachel Koblyakov playing new music under the baton of Italian conductor Luigi Gaggero. Co-founded in 2015 by Gaggero and Kyiv-based Ukho agency, it was outwardly utopian in its foundations. The group was selected in several rounds of auditions out of over one hundred fifty applicants from all over the country. In the first years its every concert was preceded by 60+ hours of rehearsals, allowing for extremely nuanced interpretations that aimed to build a deep empathic encounter between the interpreter, the composition, and the audience.

Ukho's current resume ranges from three contemporary operas — Gervasoni, Cella, and Sciarrino — produced and performed for the National Opera of Ukraine, to novel collaborations in Kyiv’s thriving contemporary art scene, international workshops for young conductors and composers, and four records released by European new music labels. The group has performed circa hundred and fifty pieces of both distinguished 20th-century composers (such as Messiaen, Grisey, Varèse, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Xenakis, Kurtág, Silvestrov…), and great contemporaries (Andreyev, Antignani, Couvreur, Gourzi, Naon, Rathé, Rotaru, Solbiati…). Two of the regularly featured Ukrainian composers, Maxim Kolomiiets and Ihor Zavhorodnii, belong to the core group of the ensemble.

Ukho’s first album, a monograph of Stefano Gervasoni with Frank Wörner as a soloist, was released in September 2018 by Winter&Winter, receiving strong reviews by Le Monde, Diapason, Voce Classico, and neue musikzeitung, amongst others. The second album, “Gardens,” a production of Toshio Hosokawa with Mario Caroli as flute soloist released in August 2019 by Kairos, was praised by The Times for “rich, static textures, pregnant silences and hyperactive outbursts.” Two more releases followed in 2020 — Alessandro Solbiati’s “Insieme” for EMA-Vinci and Samuel Andreyev’s “Iridescent notation” for Kairos.

“Exemplary musicianship” (Res Musica) then went into pandemics reclusion, coming back in 2021 with “Subsoil assets: an exhibition of operas in the pavilion of memories,” a 1500 m2 multi-media exhibition and concert series based on the ensemble's opera cycle.

Further work was interrupted by Russia's war of aggression.

Ensemble's few public appearances in the past two years were hosted by InterACT Initiative and Musik der Jahrhunderte/ECLAT (Stuttgart, 2022), and AFEKT Festival (opening concert, Tallinn, 2023). Their upcoming release of Gérard Grisey's "Vortex Temporum" for Kyiv Dispatch record label is up for release in early 2025.

Awards

2020 — “Coup de Coeur” by Académie Charles Cros for the “excellence of well-composed articulation” [Toshio Hosokawa, "Gardens" by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv and Mario Caroli (flute), cond. Luigi Gaggero].