Ivano-Frankivsk Philharmonic

Ground was broken on 21 May 1891 and the theatre opened on 22 November the same year — six months from foundation trench to first curtain. The building on the rounded corner of vul. Lesia Kurbasa has been in continuous use as a stage ever since, under four institutions and three states. It is now the Ira Malaniuk Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Philharmonic, the main concert hall of Prykarpattia, and a philharmonic fifty years younger than the house it occupies.

The theatre that lost its dome

The Stanisław Moniuszko Music Society wanted Stanyslaviv to have a theatre of its own and ran a competition for the design. It was won by Józef Łapiński, who had entered under a pseudonym. What he put up was a two-storey L, its semicircular corner carrying a dome and spire, a four-column portico over the entrance — the parade front of a provincial theatre of the 1890s.

Almost none of that survives. The building was damaged in the First World War, and in 1928–29 the Kraków architect Stanisław Trela stripped it back: dome and portico gone, arched windows squared off, the sculptural detail replaced by a heavy balcony, the auditorium enlarged, electricity and central heating installed. Trela was raising the new town hall on Ploshcha Rynok at the same time — the only constructivist ratusha in Ukraine — which tells you which way the city's taste had turned. The plain building on the corner is the 1929 verdict on the 1891 one.

Who has stood on this stage

A plaque went up on the facade in 1987 for three people who performed here around the turn of the 20th century: Maria Zankovetska and Mykola Sadovskyi, who built modern Ukrainian theatre between them, and the soprano Solomiya Krushelnytska. From 1939 the house belonged to the Ivan Franko Ukrainian Music and Drama Theatre. When that company moved to a new building in 1980, the philharmonic — founded in 1940 and until then without a stage of its own — took the place over.

It is a working concert organisation rather than a monument. The resident forces are a symphony orchestra, the chamber orchestra Harmonia Nobile, the string ensemble Quattro corde, and jazz and vocal groups. The main hall seats 380; a chamber hall upstairs holds 70. The season runs through the year and dates go on sale months ahead.

Ira Malaniuk

The hall took her name on 15 September 2017, and the choice was local. Ira Malaniuk was born in Stanyslaviv on 29 January 1919, a few streets from this door. She studied with Adam Didur in Lviv and Anna Bahr-Mildenburg in Vienna, made her debut in Graz in 1945, joined the Zurich Opera in 1947 and from 1952 sang at the Munich and Vienna state operas. The mezzo roles carried her to La Scala, Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, Salzburg and Bayreuth. Germany and Austria both made her a Kammersängerin, the highest honour the German-speaking opera world gives a singer.

She left the stage in 1971, taught at the Graz conservatory, and died at Zirl in Austria in 2009. She could not come back to the city she was born in until Ukraine was independent — and when she did, she came to teach.

Going to a concert

The address is vul. Lesia Kurbasa 3, named for the director who founded Berezil and began in Galicia with Hnat Khotkevych's Hutsul Theatre and the touring Ruska Besida company. Nothing documents a link between Kurbas and this building; the street and the hall simply ended up in the same cultural corner of the city.

Check the programme before you plan an evening. Symphonic, chamber, jazz and vocal nights alternate at close to weekly intervals, and a seat costs a fraction of what the same programme costs in Lviv or Kyiv. Come a few minutes early for the rounded corner and the 1987 plaque, and use the interval to go up to the round hall on the first floor.