Lviv’s Vivere String Quartet released an astonishingly beautiful album October 4, Prayer for Ukraine. Recorded at Stanford University and issued by San Francisco-based Phenotypic Recordings, the album’s internationally admired ensemble brings together contemporary and Ukrainian classical music expressing the country’s wartime travails. In sharing Ukrainian classical music and culture with wider audiences, the musicians hope to offer solace to all who seek it. Proceeds from the album will be donated to nonprofit organizations providing relief in Ukraine.

The track list includes Zoltan Almashi’s haunting “Maria’s City (Mariupol),” composed in a bomb shelter during that city’s three-month siege. Hannah Havrylets’s lyrical “To Mary” and “Expressions” represent a Lviv composer gone too soon: Havrylets died on the invasion’s third day because of the lack of appropriate medical care. Almashi’s “Carpathian Song,” together with Vasyl Barvinsky’s solemn “Prayer,” adds Ukrainian folk themes to the mix. Authorities destroyed the music of the Lviv-based Barvinsky following his arrest in 1948. He reconstructed these scores and other lost works following his release from the GULAG a decade later. 

Each of the group’s selections connects expressively to Ukraine’s present and past traumas. The players transform the emotional difficulties they experienced in performing the music to create a recording of exceptional passion and beauty.

Violinists Anna Bura and Dmytro Lysko, violist Uslym Zhuk, and cellist Dmytro Nikolayev formed the quartet in 2010 while students at the Lviv National Academy of Music. As the name of the group—Vivere, meaning “to live”—suggests, its members believe that music is integral to Ukrainian life. Music carries the message of independence and freedom for Ukrainians even during the darkest days of occupation and repression.

The quartet has won praise over the past decade and a half for the heart-wrenching poignancy and explosive power of their playing as they have toured throughout Ukraine, Europe, and North America. Their previous programs and recordings of Ivan Karabyt’s String Quartet and Johannes Brahams’s Quintet combine Ukrainian works with those of the European classical repertoire. This blend remains a signature feature of their group.

Each musician has enjoyed success as a soloist as well as a member of orchestras and large ensembles. Lysko has won additional notoriety for performing on a violin crafted by his carpenter great-great-grandfather. The instrument has been passed down in his family through four generations. His grandfather taught violin in the family’s living room, surrounded by violins of all types. Lysko began studying violin at the age of seven. 

Each musician hid their instruments when the war started. While far from the front lines, Lviv nonetheless remains within about five minutes flying time for the fastest Russian rockets. Consequently, the quartet practiced while constantly listening for air raid sirens.

Recording Prayer for Ukraine proved to be its own harrowing adventure. The quartet members traveled to Warsaw twice on stressful 10-hour bus journeys, first to secure US visas and then to connect to flights to California. Once in the Bay Area, they maximized their recording time by remaining at the studio day and night. Their playing provided hope, joy, and solidarity to one another and to the Ukrainian cause. Those emotions pour out through each track on the album.

In an August 2023 interview with The New York Times, violinist Anna Bura underscored the important of music, especially Ukrainian music, at this moment. “Russia says there’s no Ukrainian culture, or music, or language,” she said. “They want to erase Ukrainian culture. We want to show people we are here.” Prayer for Ukraine tells the world not only that Ukrainians remain present, but it offers the rest of us unchallenged beauty, elegance, joy, and grace.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.