Sacred Land: Songs and Poems of Resilience from Ukraine

Conductor and actor Marika Kuzma has led concerts in venues such as Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, CA, and the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Austria, and has appeared as an actor onstage in roles at La MaMa Theater in New York, Berkeley Rep, and Marin Shakespeare as well as in film. She is a professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley, where she led choirs for some twenty-five years in repertoire spanning Hildegarde to Bach, Verdi, and John Adams. She has guest conducted choirs at Dartmouth College, the Montreal Symphony Chorus, and many others. As a chorus master, Kuzma collaborated with conductors including Gustavo Dudamel, Jane Glover, Nicholas McGegan, and Kent Nagano in productions as varied as the American premieres of Takemitsu Gemeaux and Mark Morris production of Platée and a semi-staged Wagner Tannhäuser in Montreal. Of Ukrainian descent, Kuzma was born in Hartford, CT, into a diaspora family and community that treasured Ukraine’s heritage of music and poetry. She is an expert particularly in the music of Bortniansky, having won an award for her research and published a critical edition of his concertos for Carus International. She writes “I have enjoyed a multifaceted career, and each aspect of my work informs the other. I aim to create beautiful, meaningful, and memorable experiences with singers, instrumentalists, actors, artists at all levels of expertise. Currently, I’m most interested in creating events that create awareness of societal issues.” Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, she has led concerts of Ukrainian music coast to coast including St. Joseph Cathedral in Hartford, the Legacy Theater in Branford, and with Grammy Award winning saxophonist Paul Winter in Ansonia, CT.

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Ensemble Cherubim is a community of artists that creates a kind of choral theater, fluidly weaving together solo songs, choral music, and poetry. The choir first came together to record the sacred choral concertos of Dmitry Bortniansky for the Naxos International label: Dmitry Bortniansky, I cried out to the Lord: Hymns and Choral Concertos. Released in 2013, the recording achieved critical acclaim: “If you think an hour of unaccompanied choral music can become monotonous, think again” (Fanfare Magazine). The singers for that recording were alumni of the Chamber Chorus of the University of California, Berkeley, and members of the Montreal Symphony Chorus, who shared a common appreciation for Eastern European choral music. Since then, the ensemble has gained singers from various parts of the country. It gathered in 2021 to perform in New Haven and New York a program that juxtaposed Ukrainian and English Christmas music and included story-telling spoken by the famous British film director Jonathan Lynn. Last year at the Berkeley Festival of Early Music, the ensemble performed a concert of pre-1850 repertoire from Ukraine that gave witness to its long history and deeply rooted culture.

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Doctors United for Ukraine (DU4U) is a non-profit incorporation of Yale medical professionals with Ukrainian roots. Dwight Hall at Yale serves as a fiscal sponsor for this urgent campaign. Your gift is tax-deductible and 100% goes to DU4U work. Your tax acknowledgment will come from Dwight Hall at Yale.

Our Mission: Deliver precision aid to foster the health and wellbeing of Ukrainian people in the face of war and its consequences.
Our Vision: Help rebuild a thriving clinical care and research enterprise in Ukraine, in partnership with its healthcare professionals and academics.
Our Strategy: Fill the gaps left by other non-profit efforts for medical and mental health needs in Ukraine. Succeed in this with Precision Support of Critical Care Doctors and Mental Health Care providers with supplies, skill-building and care infrastructure.

DU4U’s aid is specific. We know what is needed because we are in direct contact with doctors in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Kyiv, Mykolaiv and Lviv hospitals. DU4U can meet the supply needs quickly because we work with and pay directly to companies/providers in Ukraine and Poland. This approach drastically hastens delivery.