Elizaveta Agrafenina - Elegies and Echoes (2024)

Dedicated to bringing back to life the music of lesser-known and unjustifiably forgotten composers who, despite their huge and indisputable talent, are nowadays neglected because of historical and geopolitical reasons that had nothing to do with their musical abilities, Elegies and Echoes presents the works of four composers, born in Eastern Europe and of Jewish descent, who had to endure different shapes of persecution and threats during their lifetimes. Three of these composers were born in Ukraine and one in Poland, but their countries and cities of origin were called differently in their lifetimes (sometimes more than once) and they all moved away to other places, because of History’s fate and of cynical power games between super nations: the Austro- Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire (and then the Soviet Union) and ultimately Nazi Germany. We sadly still nowadays bear witness to the consequences of these tragic historical and political choices.
These composers have been selected as a symbolic representation of the past times which are forever gone, of these cities shattered and lives broken, where music is the only reminder of what has been. With very different and contrasted styles and characters, their works epitomize a journey through half a century of enormous hopes and irreparable losses. They share in common that they were born in an extremely fertile area from an artistic point of view, spread across present-day Poland and Ukraine, but spent their lives in other lands due to the turmoils of the 20th Century and faced, at one moment or another, in different places, the venom of antisemitism, although having lived their Judeity in varied ways.