This month, conductor Vitali Alekseenok was slated to conduct concerts in Lviv, Dnipro, and Kyiv, as well as open the Kharkiv Music Festival as its new artistic director. Instead, four days after the beginning of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, he and his girlfriend drove two trucks full of aid supplies eight and a half hours from Berlin to the Polish-Ukrainian border. They stayed there for a week, helping out as drivers, mediators, and interpreters as more than half a million Ukrainians crossed the border into Poland. The day after he returned to Berlin, I reached him via Zoom. Shortly after that, he went back to the border.
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