The day before her work, The Bell, debuts at Carnegie Hall, Victoria Poleva sits down for a conversation with Leah Batstone of the Ukrainian Cultural Music Festival. Several of Victoria’s piano pieces will be performed by New York-based Irena Portenko and Anna Shelest.

On October 30th, Victoria Poleva’s work will be performed by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall as a part of their New Virtuoso: Borders concert.

VICTORIA POLEVA (b. 1962) was born in a family of musicians – her grandfather was a renowned singer and her father was a composer.  She studied composition in the studio of Ivan Karabyts (1984-1989), and Levko Kolodub (1990-1995) at Kyiv Conservatory, where she also taught composition in 1990-2005. In her early works, including the ballet Gagaku, Transforma for symphony orchestra, Anthem for chamber orchestra and others, Polevá adopted avant-garde and polystylistic aesthetics. Since the late 1990s, she became increasingly drawn to spiritual themes and simplicity, and developed a style identified by European critics as “sacred minimalism.”

Leah Batstone is a historical musicologist focusing on the intersections of political revolution and musical innovation at the peripheries of empire, particularly in late Habsburg Austria and 20th and 21st century Ukraine. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the NYU Jordan Center, where she is working on the first monograph on Ukrainian musical modernism, a project she began as a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Vienna’s REWIRE Programme, a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions project COFUND supported by the European Commission.

The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) represents endless possibility. To date, the ensemble has performed works by more than 800 American composers—a stunning number that becomes even more amazing upon seeing the list of names. Its first concert of the Carnegie Hall season includes world premieres by rising composers Paul Novak and Kebra-Seyoun Charles, who joins on bass. ACO welcomes guitarist Mak Grgić in a New York premiere by Michael Abels, who won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for his work with Rhiannon Giddens. The orchestra also performs the New York premiere of Ukrainian composer Victoria Polevá’s The Bell with cellist Inbal Segev, who premiered the piece in 2023 with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.