Classical Series a Respite From War for Ukrainian Musicians

Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv, professor of violin and viola and head of strings at the University of Connecticut, and Igor Leschishin, principal oboist of the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, travel to Greensboro every August. The musicians play in and codirect the Caspian Music Sunday Concerts at the Highland Center for the Arts. The locale is a haven for them: Both are from Lviv, Ukraine, where their families still live, despite Russia’s ongoing war against the country.

“Vermont is our happy place — for everyone,” Ivakhiv, 45, of New Haven, Conn., said by phone. By “everyone,” she means all the high-caliber musicians she entices up to the tiny Northeast Kingdom town to play in the series. A regular soloist around the world with the Hunan Symphony Orchestra, Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra and others, Ivakhiv has played in and programmed Caspian Music since 2018 and officially became its artistic director in 2023.

Leschishin, 56, who lives in Washington, D.C., and has a daughter there, began playing in the series in 2000 and took on the music directorship two years later. “Immediately, I fell in love with the area, the people, the nature — it was just beautiful,” he said. Greensboro residents house the musicians during the series’ three concerts.

The experience is a small respite from the mental stress of tracking the destruction of their homeland since Russia invaded in 2022 — and, in Ivakhiv’s case, from braving the war itself to perform.

The violinist has visited Lviv three times since it started. Between November 2023 and January 2024, she and the Lviv National Philharmonic recorded an album of Ukrainian Christmas carols arranged for solo violin and orchestra in Lviv’s Liudkevych Hall while missiles fell on the city.

“We lost electricity; we were afraid that the missiles were going to hit,” she recalled. But, she added, “The musicians were so grateful because they felt they were not forgotten.”

After Naxos released Ukrainian Christmas in November 2024 — the UK magazine Gramophone dubbed its existence “fairly miraculous” — Ivakhiv returned to Lviv in December to perform it with her hometown orchestra. More missile attacks cast the first half of the concert in darkness, but the musicians persisted, enabled by iPads and stand lights.

“At night, where I was staying, I could see the Ukrainian military trying to intercept the missiles with drones. The building next to where I was staying was destroyed a week later,” Ivakhiv said. “But I only experienced it for a week, and people live it daily.”

Despite these near misses, Ivakhiv went back to Lviv in May 2025 for another concert with the Philharmonic. This time, the electricity failed, but there were no missile attacks that evening.

Leschishin used to return to Lviv once or twice a year to visit family, play concerts and commission Ukrainian composers. He hasn’t been back since the war started because, as a male under 60, he is subject to conscription. “If I go there, they wouldn’t let me out,” he said.

Ivakhiv copes with the dissonance of following the news there and continuing to perform here by bringing Ukrainian music to her audiences. On August 24, Caspian Music will give the first performance in North America, according to her research, of the overture and an aria from the opera Alcide by Ukrainian composer Dmytro Bortniansky (1751-1825). Andrea Nalywajko, a soprano of Ukrainian descent studying at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, will sing the aria.

Bortniansky is a major figure in Ukrainian music history and was among the first Eastern European composers to gain recognition in the West. “I studied the piece in school [in Ukraine], of course, but never played it,” Leschishin said.

Unlike other Greensboro-area attractions such as Jasper Hill Farm, Hill Farmstead Brewery, Circus Smirkus, and Bread and Puppet Theater, Caspian Music has flown somewhat under the radar. It’s also small: A season consists of two chamber music concerts and an orchestral one over three weeks. Founded by Boston musician Tom Zajkowski in the 1980s, the series first performed in area homes, then moved to the Caledonia Grange in East Hardwick. (It used to be a Monday-night series and was known as Caspian Mondays.)

The opening of the Highland Center for the Arts in 2017 and Ivakhiv assuming artistic leadership of Caspian Music the next year were pivotal for the series, Leschishin said. He called both the venue and the musicians Ivakhiv brings in “world-class.”

This season’s performers include Philip Edward Fisher, a UK pianist who trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Juilliard School in New York City and has performed concertos with orchestras worldwide. On August 3, he will play Ernest Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 21. Joining on that piece will be Callisto Quartet, which formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music, won the 2018 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and held a residency at Yale University, among other institutions. Violinist Matthew Hakkarainen, who will play a string trio by Ludwig von Beethoven on August 10, just landed Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s associate concertmaster position.

Ivakhiv draws musicians from a wide array of contacts. She came to the U.S. to study at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and now teaches violin at both UConn and the Longy School of Music of Bard College, in Cambridge, Mass. She is also artistic director of the Music at the Institute concert series at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City.

Leschishin came to the States to earn his master’s at Manhattan School of Music and played for two years in the New World Symphony in Miami Beach under Michael Tilson Thomas before settling into his position at the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra 27 years ago. Despite sharing a hometown, he and Ivakhiv only learned of each other shortly after he started his job in D.C., while she was at Curtis. “There are not too many Ukrainian musicians in major orchestras in the U.S.,” the oboist explained.

For these two, at least, Greensboro provides a brief respite. “We are happy to come to that community because it’s isolated but they have this tremendous interest in music,” Leschishin noted.

Ivakhiv agreed. “People are so friendly and eager to hear good music,” she said. “We love the hall, and it’s a beautiful part of Vermont. We treat it as a way to get together and do what we love to do most.”

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.

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