By Jason and Alisha Hagey
Once again, UtahPresents brings something unique and expansive to our little Utah world with Kurbasy’s “Songs of the Ukrainian Forest,” and we are better for it. When the house lights collapse into darkness, the room doesn’t fall silent so much as it braces. A thin breath hangs over Kingsbury Hall. Then the women of Kurbasy step out of the dim with the quiet certainty of people who’ve carried songs for centuries. They stand there a moment as if half ritual or half apparition. They are representative of the ancient Ukrainian soul.
Their first notes rise the way smoke does when the fire thinks it’s dying but isn’t done yet. The sound carries the wet heaviness of Ukrainian earth after rain, and also the brittleness of a century that keeps trying, stubbornly, to begin again. This isn’t a concert; the word feels flimsy. What they do is closer to opening a door in the dark and letting something ancestral walk through. You feel it in the throat before you hear it in the ears.
The harmonies bloom slowly, then all at once. Maria Oneschak’s (Vocalist, Artistic Director) voice cuts clean as a blade of cold wind. Natalia Rybka-Parkhomenko (Vocalist, Artistic Director) meets her with a deeper, duskier warmth that coils around the melody until it becomes a single, many-angled shape. When their voices slip into dissonance, the room tightens; when they reconcile, people exhale like they forgot they’d been holding anything at all.
Their bodies move with the kind of restraint that reads like knowledge rather than minimalism: gestures passed down through generations. A hand raised. A head turned as if listening to something offstage and far away. Perhaps ghosts? Grycja Erde & Jardim’s (Projection Designers) projections don’t illustrate the songs; they haunt them. Folklore melts into a dream, and the dream into a kind of collective remembering. The effect is otherworldly and transcendent.
Vsevolod Sadovyi (Ukrainian Instruments), Severyn Danyleiko (Cello), Artem Kamenkov (Double Bass), and Markiian Turkanyk (Violin) don’t accompany so much as orbit. A dulcimer ripples like a creek under ice. A gold line is dragged across the darkness by the violin and cello. A double bass murmurs low enough to settle into your ribs. Tibetan bowls shiver at the edges of the soundscape, widening the room until it feels almost geological, layers of time pressed together in tone and overtone.
Amidst all of this beauty, something is piercing and unavoidable: silent but unrelenting defiance. Once associated with fields, harvests, and village circles, these songs now represent the struggle of a nation to maintain its unity. Their internal joy does not make up for their sadness. It stands next to it, bright and unyielding. Faces across the hall display that recognition in a stillness that is not passivity but rather reverence.
By the final piece, the hall feels rearranged. No dramatic climax, no theatrical bow – just a gradual dissolving, as if the ritual has lifted and the women are stepping back into whatever realm they borrowed it from. The silence they leave behind is thick enough to touch. The audience stands in awe and applause in the afterglow of something that feels older than art and newer than grief.
Kurbasy leaves you with a sensation lodged somewhere between heartbeat and memory. Not a message, not a lesson, but an echo of survival, the soft but insistent reminder that music can carry the weight of a people and still rise. It can hurt and heal in the same breath. It can testify. By the time they get to Chevrona Kalyna, and on a night like this, in a hall that suddenly feels smaller than the world it held, it does. До Перемоги – Do Peremohy – To Victory!
A song cycle in 75 minutes, presented without intermission
Utah Presents Kurbasy “Songs of the Ukrainian Forest”
Kingsbury Hall, Eccles Theater, Libby Gardner Concert Hall
1395 Presidents’ Cir, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
November 5, 2025
7:30 PM
Box Office: 801-581-7100 (opens at 12 pm_
Tickets: $13 – $47 (youth 6-18 are $13)
Purchase at: https://www.utahpresents.org/
Utah Presents
Center Stage – Kurbasy
Coming Soon:
To Be a God featuring Little Moon: Nov 13, 14
The Lower Lights Christmas Concerts: Dec 11
Kurbasy is part of Center Stage, a public diplomacy initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with funding provided by the U.S. Government, administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts in cooperation with the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations. General management is provided by Lisa Booth Management, Inc. www.CenterStageUS.org
UtahPresents, the performing arts presenter at the U of U, offers a mix of creativity and culture that is at the cutting edge of arts programming. The new season of UtahPresents, the performing arts presenter at the U of U, offers a mix of creativity and culture that is at the cutting edge of arts programming. The new season of UtahPresents, based at the iconic Kingsbury Hall on the U of U campus, showcases a total of 19 exciting performances. Whether your love is dance, theater and story telling, music, jazz, or an eclectic mix of them all, UtahPresents has shows for every taste.
Building on previous presenting seasons at Kingsbury Hall, UtahPresents launched in 2015 with a new brand and mission focused on community engagement and enrichment. Now, UtahPresents is celebrating 10 years of programming, having presented close to 2,000 artists from 37 countries and served nearly one million people, including 75,000 K-12 students. In addition to student matinees and public performances, UtahPresents offers masterclasses, community workshops, performance opportunities for young artists and more.
As UtahPresents’ programming has grown over the past 10 years, the organization is always committed to making the arts affordable. UtahPresents’ total compensation for artists more than doubled from 2015 to 2025, yet the average ticket price remains under $25. U of U students can access all UtahPresents’ performances for just $5 with their UCard (Arts Pass).
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