‘No Russian words from my lips, no Russian music from my hand’: the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra hit the UK

With apps giving them air-raid warnings, the Kyiv-based musicians now see themselves as soldiers and their instruments as weapons. So what will they play when they arrive in Britain this month?‘People often ask me about my work with Ukrainian musicians,” says the Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Ly

With apps giving them air-raid warnings, the Kyiv-based musicians now see themselves as soldiers and their instruments as weapons. So what will they play when they arrive in Britain this month?

‘People often ask me about my work with Ukrainian musicians,” says the Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson. “They will say things like, ‘How are things out there? We don’t hear much about the war, I guess it’s all calmed down a bit.’ When I hear that I want to scream, ‘No, it really hasn’t calmed down!’.”

Wilson established the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in the weeks after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With her husband, Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she contacted leaders of the world’s top international orchestras and located dozens of elite Ukrainian musicians – some working in western Europe, some who had fled Russia, others performing in Kyiv, Lviv or Odesa – to establish a 75-piece “battalion of culture” who would assemble for a few weeks each year.