Evgeni Orkin

Born: October 2, 1977, in Lviv, Ukraine

Five Interrupted Lullabies, Op. 91

• Composed: 2024
• Premiere: September 5, 2024, Odense (Denmark) Symphony Orchestra, Oksana Lyniv conducting
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes (incl. 2 piccolos, alto flute), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bongo, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, vibraphone, wood block, strings
• CSO Notable Performances: These are the first CSO performances of Five Interrupted Lullabies
• Duration: approx. 15 minutes

The multi-faceted career of Evgeni Orkin encompasses composing, conducting, teaching, scholarship and performing internationally as clarinetist and saxophonist. Orkin, born in 1977 into a musical family in Lviv, near Ukraine’s western border with Poland, studied at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music in Kyiv before doing advanced work in Utrecht and at the Musikhochschule in Mannheim; he now teaches at the Mannheim Musikhochschule. As a clarinetist, Orkin has been a member of the Kyiv Camerata, appeared as soloist and chamber musician at concerts and festivals throughout northern Europe, and recorded both recent and earlier music on modern and historical instruments; his Methodical Introduction to Learning and Playing the Historical Clarinet has been published in German, English and Ukrainian. Evgeni Orkin is also a prolific, award-winning composer whose works include operas (Magister Ludi, after Hermann Hesse, and Das Märchen der Waldkönigin Ach, based on a Ukrainian fairy tale about the Forest Queen Ach); symphonies for chamber and symphony orchestra; concertos for violin, piano, saxophone and clarinet; vocal pieces; and chamber music. Among his honors are the Ukrainian President’s Award (1999), first prize in the 2004 Composition Competition of the Festival of the Jewish World Congress, first prize in the 2005 Composition Competition of the Goethe Institute Mannheim, and the European Music Prize from the City of Berlin (2023).

“In Memory of the Children, Victims of War,” reads the wrenching phrase that Evgeni Orkin appended to the title of his Five Interrupted Lullabies. The work was commissioned by Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv to “commemorate the events of the night of March 2, 2024 in Odessa when a rocket attack claimed the lives of four infants and a baby.” Lyniv premiered Five Interrupted Lullabies with the Odense Symphony Orchestra in distant Denmark on September 5, 2024, and first performed it in Ukraine with the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra on February 24, 2025 in a concert marking the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. That program also included Victoria Poleva’s Bucha. Lacrimosa (which captures the unspeakable horrors and war crimes committed in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022), Yuri Laniuk’s Grieving Thorn (which presents the inner monologue of a thornbush that foresees its branches becoming the crown of thorns for Jesus), and closed with Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont, Goethe’s play about political oppression overthrown in the name of freedom. 

For the program in Kyiv, Lyniv wrote:  

The tragedy of war is that it does not single out individual heroes but, like a natural disaster, devastates everything — every family. It affects soldiers, men, brothers, women, infants, artists and poets who will never create new works again, as well as the youth whose future has been stolen. Through this concert program, we seek to share these harrowing stories and honor the countless victims who lost their lives due to the Russian invasion. War is the antithesis of humanity. That is why we must unite our efforts with all international partners to achieve a just peace for a democratic and sovereign Ukraine.

—©Dr. Richard E. Rodda