Hryhorii Mytrofanovych Davydovskyi (January 6 (18), 1866, Melnya village, now Konotop district, Sumy region - April 13, 1952, Poltava) was an outstanding choirmaster, composer, teacher, Honored Artist of the Ukrainian SSR.
He was born in the village of Melnya (now Konotop district, Sumy region) in the family of the priest Mytrofan Lukianovych Davydovskyi, a law teacher at the Melnya village primary school.
The Davydovsky family was a singing family. In his handwritten Memoirs, Mytrofan recalled: "We always devoted our leisure hours to choral singing. During the holidays, when our relatives and friends from neighboring villages would come to Melnya, we would sing in a rather powerful and beautiful choir." In his native village, Hryhorii founded his first choir in 1888 with 25 villagers, which existed for over 60 years.
In 1897, he graduated from the Kapellmeister's Faculty of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Mykola Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatolii Liadov were teaching at the time, and continued his studies in the class of solo singing with Professor E. Ivanov-Smolensky. During his student years, Hryhoriy Mytrofanovych took an active part in opera performances at the Conservatory as a singer and conductor, and at the same time began his composing career, arranging Ukrainian and Russian folk songs.
Works.
He composed his first work, the choral suite Bandura, in 1896, inspired by his memories of Ukraine, "its good folk songs, which I sang in my native village of Melny since childhood." This work received international recognition, was published and performed in the United States and Western Europe, and entered the repertoire of thousands of choirs in Ukraine and Russia.
The resounding success of the Bandura suite inspired Davydovsky to create a similar fantasy based on the themes of Ukrainian songs, Kobza (1910), and the poem for choir Ukraine (1911). In total, our compatriot left behind 80 choral works and arrangements of folk songs. Davydovskyi did a lot of work on organizing choral groups. For example, in St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian student choir he created enjoyed great success, and in May 1902 was invited to perform at a reception for representatives of the French squadron that arrived in the capital, led by French President Emile Loubet.
The French liked Ukrainian songs so much that Hryhorii Mytrofanovych was invited to France to organize an exemplary choral chapel there. With this chapel, Davydovskyi gave a series of concerts in different cities of the country, and he also performed as a tenor soloist. After returning from France in 1903, he set out to organize exemplary choral chapels in Russia and Ukraine, worked fruitfully in Rostov-on-Don, Moscow, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, and other cities, and during his lifetime created 35 Ukrainian and Russian choral groups.
Davydovskyi combined his performing and composing activities with the tireless work of a teacher, and over the 60 years of his creative life he trained a whole galaxy of conductors.
The last years of Hryhorii Mytrofanovych's life were spent in Poltava, where he directed the Regional Philharmonic Choir, but he always maintained close ties with his native land, finding time to visit Sumy, Konotop, and Melnya.
