Interview with the Ukrainian Conductor, Natalia Ponomarchuk.
Natalia Ponomarchuk was in Odesa when the war began. She was with the National Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra rehearsing the Dvořák Violin Concerto, Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, and Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale”. The concert was scheduled for the evening of 25 February 2022. But, in the middle of the night of the 24th, she was woken by the sudden boom and reverberation of powerful explosions. Odesa was being bombed. In the darkness, all she could hear was the sounds of war: the low whine of the missiles just before they hit; the rumble of stricken buildings; sirens; chaos.
The concert never happened. Instead, by morning, she was at the bus station. She had a plane ticket home to Kyiv. But the skies were closed. The trains were also impossible. Nobody wanted to commit to any form of transport that might be targeted. She was desperate to get back to be with her elderly mother in Kyiv. There was so little information. The rumours were that Russian soldiers were pouring across the borders in great numbers. The journey was fraught, anxious. She had the feeling of everything in her life changing fundamentally in real time; the passing of an era in a single day…
