Ostapovych Ivan Ivanovych (11 May 1988, Chernivtsi region) - conductor, composer, cultural manager. Founder of the Ukrainian Festival Orchestra (formerly Collegium Musicum Orchestra). Artistic director of numerous art projects and classical music festivals. Co-founder of the Collegium Musicum Lviv organisation, which has been organising concerts and literary readings with young talented Ukrainian performers since 2012. He is the vice director of the Galician Music Society. One of the directors of the Lviv Organ Hall.
Biography.
Ivan Ostapovych spent his early years in the Chernivtsi region:
"I grew up in a small town in the Chernivtsi region, but I was very lucky with my teachers. The people who taught me really loved music. Although at their own level. I could feel the awe with which they treated music and art in general. Once, during a lesson on music literature, my teacher Svitlana Stepanivna Ostapovych (she was a distant relative of mine) told us about the symphony genre and the works of Haydn.
I graduated from the Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy, bassoon and composition classes, professor B. Frolyak. B. Frolyak.
He studied at the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine at the Department of Opera and Symphony Conducting (class of Professor Viktor Zdorenko, People's Artist of Ukraine).
Professional activity
Since 2012, he has been a co-founder and artistic director of the Collegium Musicum artistic platform, which promotes academic music and its performers. In 2013-2015, he worked as the second conductor of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Philharmonic.
In 2013, he was a participant of the directing and dramaturgy laboratory at the Lviv Academic Theatre named after L. Kurbas. He is the founder of the Collegium Musicum orchestra, now the Ukrainian Festival Orchestra.
Since November 2017, he has been the director of the Lviv House of Organ and Chamber Music.
Since 2018, he has been a presenter at Radio Skovoroda (classical music programme "Territory of Classics"). He is a co-author of the Ukrainian Live strategy for promoting Ukrainian classical music in Ukraine and the world. One of the initiators of the restoration of the historic Galician Music Society in 2020, which existed in Lviv since 1838. Member of the board of directors of the [Galician Music Society]. Artistic director of the Ukrainian Live Classic project (the first mobile application with Ukrainian classical music).
Since 2021 - Head of the Department of Culture at Lviv City Council.
Creative achievements
Ivan Ostapovych won the first prize at the All-Ukrainian Conductor Competition in Kherson.
He has performed with the National Honoured Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, the Chamber Orchestra of the Rivne Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of the Ternopil Philharmonic, the INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra, and the Cantus Chamber Choir (Uzhhorod). In 2013, he was a participant in the directorial and dramatic laboratory at the Lviv Academic Theatre named after L. Kurbas.
He is the founder of the chamber orchestra Collegium Musicum Lviv, which consists of young and initiative musicians from Lviv and Kyiv, namely: Taras Demko, Ihor Zavhorodniy, Orest Smovzh, Petor Tityaev, Natalia Kozhushko, Dmytro Choni, Anastasia Boyko, Diana Kolomiets, Vitaliy Vyshynsky. Ivan Ostapovych is the author and organiser of the Colllegium musicum Lviv project platform, which has been hosting concerts and readings with young talented Ukrainian performers in Lviv since 2012. In particular, the festival "Days of Bach Music 2014", "Winter Evenings by Collegium Musicum", "Bach Marathon" (Lviv 2015).
The Collegium Musicum team, led by Ivan Ostapovych, organised the Days of Bach Music in the garrison church of Peter and Paul on Teatralna Street in Lviv. Virtuoso cellist Denis Severin from Switzerland also joined in the organisation and conduct of the event. In this way, they are promoting classical music among young people and doing it absolutely free of charge.
Ostapovych adds: "The idea of free access to high art is long overdue in society, and we are simply bringing it to life."
The main goal of the festival, as conceived by the Ukrainian musicians, was to make classical music accessible to the general public. And the musicians decided to bring this to life based on the experience of Collegium Musicum. This is how musical groups were called in Europe in the seventeenth century. They were widespread in the Baroque era, and became especially popular in Germany. Musicians, bandleaders, composers and music lovers gathered together to create music. Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Georg Philipp Telemann were members of the Collegium Musicum. There were no concert halls at that time, one could hear music either in a church or in a palace, and the collegiums popularised it among the population.
Contribution to Ukrainian music
Ivan Ostapovych made a great contribution to the return of Ukrainian classical music to the cultural space. In particular, those works that were deliberately forgotten during the Soviet era. Ivan Ostapovych comments on the current situation with Ukrainian classical music:
"From my experience as a musician, I can tell you that in general we know very little about our music...at the conservatory, all the choir members know that Liudkevych is the 'Caucasus'. Everyone has conducted him. But in fact, Lyudkevych was made that way by the Soviet propaganda system, because there were a lot of searches in his early work. For example, there are two early piano concertos that no one knows about, not even pianists. And in almost every composer, if you dig a little deeper, you can find something interesting that does not fit into the usual system of ideas about this composer..."
Ivan Ostapovych initiated the creation of the first mobile application about Ukrainian classical music - Ukrainian Live Classic, which contains more than 500 professional recordings of musical works.
Ivan Ostapovych is also a composer. However, he admits that at the moment he does not have enough time for this. For the last year, he has been conducting and organising events. Although, ideas are brewing... He composes classical music (a sonata for violin and piano), because for him there is no other music but classical.
