We provide our evening programmes free of charge. However, if you would like to thank us monetarily for this and can afford it, donation boxes have been available at our programme tables since the beginning of our festival season, the contents of which benefit the Youth symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (YsOU) founded by Oksana Lyniv.

With Vladimir Putin's military attack on Ukraine, which started on 24 February this year, many inhabitants had to flee their country. Numerous offers of help were formed, such as the »Music for the Future« project of the Slovenian Youth Symphony Orchestra. In the course of this project, the first priority was to evacuate young Ukrainian musicians – including the members of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (YsOU) – and their families from Ukraine to Slovenia. In a second step, a music camp was set up in Ljubljana, which offers the evacuated young people not only general school education, but above all musical education in symphonic and chamber music formations. The conductor Oksana Lyniv reports how fulfilling it is to observe that the musicians have become happier and happier over the past months.

Supported by European artists, theatres and festivals, the Slovenian-Ukrainian Music for the Future Orchestra, which emerged from the project, plays benefit concerts to raise funds. The project now serves over 140 people between the ages of five and 82. Your generous donations at our events have raised a total of €7,892 to support the Music for the Future project.

Thank you very much!

Photo © Oliver Wolf, graphic Daniel Wiesmann

The Ukrainian conductor and artistic director of the YsOU, Oksana Lyniv, finds clear words on the war in Ukraine in the Deutsche Welle interview. »At last Putin’s true intentions clear and open,« says Oksana Lyniv. »He wants to destroy an independent state, a nation with its own culture, own alphabet, its own language and history, its own artists, its own Artists, its own identity. Our development as a European state, for which we have worked for 30 years since independence, and which has and which has demanded a high price with the Maidan, is acutely in danger. Now the world has seen Putin’s Russia’s true face, which is unfortunately far from the self-declared ideal image as a country of art and humanism. At the beginning of the development was the annexation of Crimea, which was condemned all over the world. Now Putin is targeting all of Ukraine.« Her tireless commitment to her country and the arts is also visible in a video contribution by Deutsche Welle.