The conductor who drove supply vans into a war zone

Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led the opening night of the Proms in London this summer — one of the rooms where classical music decides what counts as important. Her biography carries a less ceremonial line too: in the first months of the war she drove vans of supplies across the Ukrainian border.

The connection is not symbolic. Her father is a Ukrainian immigrant, and he made sure his daughter had the language, the culture and the history. That is not something you can pick up later, should the need arise.

The new album is called “Ukrainian Mixtape”, recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. It includes an overture by Levko Kolodub, committed to record here for the first time. Stasevska says her first reaction on hearing it was not about the music at all, but about why nobody had heard of the piece.

The programme also takes in Mykola Lysenko’s opera “Taras Bulba” — a work whose title is known across Europe by far more people than its music is.

She describes driving into the war zone without any drama. Around five months in she was in Lviv, and she later said the strange part is how quickly a war zone becomes ordinary to you. Not frightening. Strange.

Her case for the whole project fits in one sentence: without culture there is no nation, which makes this front no less real than the other one. In Lithuania that sentence needs no footnote. It has been tested here, more than once.