With last Saturday’s excellent concert by the award-winning Tetiana Shafran from Ukraine, the OLS Galeria is solidifying its position as a place where music lovers come to enjoy classical music performed by renowned artists.
Tetiana Shafran took the audience by storm by opening her concert with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, no 2 “Moonlight”. Before the last notes of the last movement of the sonata – Presto agitato- rang out, the audience was entranced and thrilled with the beauty of the music and the virtuosity of the pianist.
The powerful, yet lyrical and very emotional performance continued to delight the audience when Tetiana followed up with compositions by Mykola Lysenko (“Elegy”), Ferruccio Busoni (“Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Chopin”), George Enescu (“Pavana. Op. 10) and Frederic Chopin (“Piano Sonata No.3 in B minor, Op. 58”). At the end of the concert the audience was up on their feet enthusiastically cheering and applauding the artist, who did two encores, a scherzo and a waltz by Chopin.
Chopin’s music was an obvious choice for many reasons, one of them being that Tetiana, who permanently lives in Kiev, since 2025 has been a resident pianist of the Fryderyk Concert Hall in Warsaw, where each month she performs his music.
Saturday’s concert was organized by the Polish Institute of Culture and Research in collaboration with the American Romanian Festival, whose president, Marian Tănău, initiated this collaboration and who together with Ania Bieciuk, PICROL’s Associate Director for Polonia Affairs, welcomed the audience.
Some of the guests remembered Marian Tănău, a violinist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra since 1995, from another excellent concert at the Galeria earlier this year. In February Marian Tănău performed with Kazimierz Brzozowski (piano), Mike Chen (viola) and David LeDoux (cello) in the chamber ensemble “Casa Piano Quartet”.
That was the first time Marian Tănău experienced the Galeria’s superb acoustics, which gave him the idea to bring more artists there. Mr. Tănău knew Tetiana Shafran as the Gold Medal winner of the prestigious Olga Kern International Piano Competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of which he is the executive director. Tetiana won the competition, which is held every three years, in 2019.
The diverse set of works masterfully performed by Tetiana Shafran included pieces by German, Ukrainian, Italian, Romanian and Polish composers. When briefly commenting on the way the program for Saturday’s concert was assembled, Marian Tănău mentioned the border Poland and Romania once shared (before WWII), the contemporary Ukrainian-Romanian border and the Ukrainian war refugees who both countries have been hosting since 2022.
After the concert Tetiana and Marian graciously mingled with the guests and socialized over wine, appetizers and sweets. This was the last day the exhibition “The Story of Poland in Posters” was on display, and Dr. John Radzilowski and Elijah Majeski who created the show were present to explain the artwork.
It was another very enjoyable and satisfying afternoon at the Galeria at Orchard Lake Schools.
To hear Tetiana Shafran play at the OLS Galeria on Saturday, May 23, click: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1755379335841993
