For Ukrainians — according to Maryna Storrs, a Ukrainian living in Utah — music, particularly singing, is a way to uphold cultural values, and more recently has become a therapeutic outlet.
Storrs is founder of the nonprofit Ukrainian Center of Utah - Dzherelo, which offers different programs for the state’s Ukrainian population. One of those programs is a choir made up of local Ukrainians and refugees, which now numbers between 10 and 15 members.
“Music is a way of upholding the heritage, and it’s also a way to tell a story,” said Storrs, who left Ukraine for the United States in 1998. “So a lot of songs are about the history, about the way that people are.”
Dzherelo’s choir will perform Thursday at the Eccles Theater, 131 S. Main St., Salt Lake City, to mark Ukraine’s Independence Day.
The program — a benefit for Ukrainian refugees — will be headlined by two singers popular with Utah audiences: English tenor Alfie Boe, known for his performances of “Les Misérables,” and Utah’s own David Archuleta. Also on the bill are Utah’s One Voice Children’s Choir and singer-actor Hailey Hyde, a Brigham Young University alum now based in New York.
Tickets, ranging from $40 to $250, are available through ArtTix.
The Thursday show, Storrs said, is meant “specifically to honor the Ukrainian Independence Day — and it’s a way of keeping what’s happening in Ukraine top of mind, because the longer the war wages on, the more it becomes kind of a background noise.”
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. The New York Times reported Friday that U.S. officials said nearly 500,000 troops, Ukrainian and Russian, have died or been injured in the nearly 18 months since.
The concert is sponsored by U.S. Friends of AMAR, a Utah-based charity that helps “vulnerable communities to rebuild their lives when faced by conflict.” All of the net proceeds from Thursday’s concert, organizers said, will benefit refugees in Utah and elsewhere.
Thursday’s program, Storrs said, also would include child actors reading monologues based on stories from refugees from Romania, another country where U.S. Friends of AMAR works. “They’ve gathered firsthand accounts, as far as what these children had to go through … running away from war,” Storrs said.
The Dzherelo choir will perform a famous Ukrainian song, a hymn, and a song from “Kalyna,” a Utah-made musical about Ukrainian history.
Carissa Klitgaard, the lyricist for “Kalyna” and one of its producers, is also producing Thursday’s concert, Storrs said.
It was Klitgaard, she said, who thought up the concert’s stage design, which will feature 80,000 stalks of wheat to “convey the spirit and the symbolism of Ukraine.”
The yellow lower half of the Ukrainian flag “symbolizes the wheat fields” and the blue upper half is “the blue skies above it,” Storrs said.
Utah has been welcoming of Ukrainian refugees, who have been through so much, Storrs said.
“It’s really difficult to be away from home, not knowing what the future is going to hold,” she said. “Some of them are going to stay here. Some of them are going to go back there … [there will be] a lot of split families.”
Thursday’s concert, Storrs said, will be a way to celebrate Ukraine, to “honor everything that’s been happening there, all the people who lost their lives, all the people that are still fighting "
