Volodymyr Pavenskyi is a Ukrainian composer, teacher, and sound engineer.
Volodymyr Pavenskyi was born in Chernivtsi. In 1972, he entered the Music Theory Department of the Chernivtsi Music School, graduating in 1976. After two years of service in the Armed Forces, in 1979 he entered the Preparatory Department of the Composition Faculty of the Mykola Lysenko Lviv State Conservatory (now the Lviv National Music Academy). A year later, he began his full-time studies in the class of Viktor Kaminsky, who had just started teaching at the conservatory. Now Professor Kaminsky always recalls Pawensky as his first student.
After graduating in 1985 and until 2018, Volodymyr Pavenskyi worked at the Lviv TV and Radio Company, first as a sound engineer and later as the head of the sound engineers' department, while composing his own works in various forms, genres and thematic areas. Since 1994, he has been a member of the Lviv organisation of the Union of Composers of Ukraine.
Since 2003, he has been working as a composition teacher at the Solomiya Krushelnytska Specialised Music Boarding School in Lviv. In 2012, Volodymyr Pawenskyy won the Kosenko Prize for his children's choral concert From Winter to Winter for double choir and soloists based on calendar songs.
The composer is a regular participant in the Kyiv Music Fest, Premiere of the Season, and spiritual and folklore festivals, including the Great Carol (Lviv).
Pawensky's compositional style is characterised by diversity, polystylistics, attention to all components and details of the musical material, including the search for original musical themes. Gravitating towards neoclassical and neo-romantic musical language, the composer actively experiments with modern sound writing, elements of twelve-tone diatonic, chromaticism and microchromaticism, sonority, and archaic sources. One of the key sources of inspiration for the composer is national folklore, which he refers to, in particular, in choral and chamber-instrumental compositions.
Volodymyr Pawenskyi's works cover various genres. Among them are two symphonies (one of them chamber), works for symphony and string orchestra, chamber and piano music (cycles and individual pieces), music for television performances (including a performance based on Ivan Franko's Oi Piddu I v Borislavku), pop songs and romances based on the words of Ukrainian and foreign poets. Choral music plays a key role in Pawensky's work: a number of sacred works, large-scale Liturgy and All-Night Vigil a`cappella, works on secular and national themes, numerous arrangements of folk songs. Volodymyr Pavenskyi's children's choral music sounds loud and confident on Ukrainian and foreign stages. His fruitful collaboration with the Solomiya Choir of the Solomiya Krushelnytska Music Boarding School for over 20 years has resulted in dozens of works for children's choirs. The choir has won international competitions in 14 countries with Pawensky's works: Serbia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, Canada, Austria, Belgium, and others.
