NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts

ARC Ensemble (2022x46)

Air date: May 11, 2022

The conflicts between Russia and Ukraine reach far and wide, even deep into this Tiny Desk (home) concert performed by the ARC Ensemble — artists from Canada's Royal Conservatory in Toronto. They offer music by the neglected composer Dmitri Klebanov, a Ukrainian Jew whose career was sidelined by the Stalin regime when his First Symphony was denounced in 1949. Klebanov wrote his Fourth String Quartet — from which the ensemble plays excerpts — three years earlier. He dedicated it to his compatriot, the composer Mykola Leontovych who, as a Ukrainian separatist, was murdered by the Soviet secret police in 1921.