Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra

What a response to war and violence! Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson founded the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which consists of outstanding musicians from the oppressed country. “Putin wanted to silence Ukraine,” she says, “but we will not be silenced.” Every summer, the UFO, as the orchestra has come to be known, starts afresh, landing in major music capitals and thrilling audiences at celebrated festivals: like the 2023 Lucerne Summer Festival, during which it introduced itself by playing Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Wilson has already caused a sensation at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, London’s Covent Garden, and the Vienna Staatsoper. This year she has once again programmed music by Beethoven. She will lead the UFO in his Fifth Symphony, which swerves electrifyingly from C minor to C major, signaling the journey through night to new light. After all, the last word has not come close to being spoken: hope lives on. As does beauty, to which the American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen will pay homage by performing Richard Strauss’s exquisite Four Last Songs.