Post-Apocalypse Now

The experimental Ukrainian opera "Chornobyldorf," at La Mama.

- By Alex Ross

On the morning of February 24, 2022, air-raid sirens wailed in the streets of Kyiv, heralding a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. When the composer Adrian Mocanu heard the noise, he had a curious reaction. “I thought the sirens sounded like giant wolves howling,” he told me, in an e-mail. The aural illusion haunted him, and last year he created a piece called “Time of the Wolves,” which blends recordings of sirens and of wolves into a smoldering, eerily expectant electronic soundscape. The title alludes to Michael Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup,” in which a family wanders a contaminated landscape, and also to the Old Norse epic “Völuspá,” which contains the line “Wind-time, wolftime, ere the world falls.”

Since 2022, Ukrainian artists have been thrust into a tragic spotlight, and composers are no exception. Their work has popped up on programs around the world, from élite European new-music festivals to, more rarely, American orchestral concerts. A recent online stream from the Dallas Symphony, under the direction of the Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits, features Victoria Polevá’s Cello Concerto, a mournful post-minimalist meditation, and Anna Korsun’s “Terricone,” which evokes devastation in the Donbas by directing performers to scream during the opening measures. In mid-January, the Prototype Festival and the venerable East Village venue La Mama hosted the Kyiv-based organization Opera Aperta in a two-hour-long music-theatre piece called “Chornobyldorf,” which depicts the desperate aftermath of a future catastrophe. Dystopias are much in vogue in contemporary entertainment. In Ukraine, they count as unadorned realism.