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‘It is about all of humankind’: Ukrainian violinist Valentina Goncharova on her cosmic call to compose

Born in Kyiv, trained in a Soviet conservatory and inspired in a Mongolian temple, the experimental musician describes the impulse that led to her first original album in 30 years

I needed other ‘voices’, so my husband bought me a tape recorder Goncharova and her friend, the composer and pianist Svetlana Golybina, “asked to go to Mongolia, Ulan-Ude city”, she says. He is an engineer who helps to realise her musical visions by setting up ways to overdub with basic equipment, electrifying and building her string instruments, and constructing contact mics for them to record the sounds of household objects. Goncharova: ‘When we come to this world, contact is established between the highest realm and the physical realm.’The epic symphony Ocean is unquestionably her magnum opus, but after completing it in 2022 she stopped composing, finding that her ideas just wouldn’t coalesce – until Campanelli emerged fully formed.

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