Students organize Ukraine benefit concert

Composite image of four people - Four graduate students at the Peabody Conservatory organized an evening of music by Eastern European composers and will raise money to support Ukraine through the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health Symphony orchestras have started adding the late Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk's Melody in A Minor to their concert programs to acknowledge the current humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. The short piece, which appeared as theme music in a 1980s Soviet film, became popularly known as the "spiritual hymn" of Ukraine over the ensuing decades. It's the music accompanying the video that President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky played for the U.S. Congress in March. It's the piece you may have seen musicians playing in a subway station in Kharkiv on social media videos. And it's the moving work that closes the Benefit Concert for Ukraine organized by four Peabody Conservatory graduate students from Eastern Europe that takes place at 7:30 p.m. April 15 in Peabody's Cohen-Davison Family Theatre. Moldovan cellist Evanghelina Ciobanu, Russian saxophonist Nikolai Klotchkov, Tatar pianist Ramilya Saubanova, and Ukrainian flutist Denis Savelyev organized and programmed an evening of music by Eastern European composers and invite concertgoers to donate to the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health's relief efforts using the code "Ukrainian assistance." "We're from different countries, but everyone is affected," says co-organizer Ciobanu, adding that she's Moldovan, her mom's Ukrainian, and she has relatives in Ukraine.