Sound-imaging and coloring in piano miniatures by Mykola Kolessa

The piano creativity of the famous Ukrainian artist ─ Mykola Kolessa has been considered through the prism of stylistic features of composer’s writing, sound-imaging artistic orientation, picturesque elements of musical language and principles of its pictorial component. The dominant features of the individual creative thinking and style of the composer has been discovered, the way of their formation, influenced by the personal philosophical and aesthetic-artistic interests of the Lviv artist, has been considered: an extraordinary admiration for his national folklore (in particular Hutsul), visual arts (especially painting) and Ukrainian art in general. Relying on the materials of many existing research works, in which the aspect of the problems of musical painting is considered, a number of compositions by Mykola Kolessa written for piano have been analyzed in the present article. In particular, such works as: suite cycle “Little things”, the program suite “Portraits of Hutsul Region”, sonatina, four preludes (“Fantastic”, “Autumn”, “Hutsul”, “About Dovbush”), the cycle “Passacaglia, Scherzo and Fugue”. The general sound-imaging direction of the piano music of M. Kolessa and the pictorial and visual elements of the composer’s artistic thinking has been revealed through the analysis in the study of the peculiarities of the musical language, the specifics of the rhythmicintonational structures, the type of the textual presentation of the material, the mode-tonal aspect, the genre component and, most of all, its software vector. The obtained results are valuable not only from the point of view of musicology, but also first of all, for the development of the art of piano interpretation of Ukrainian music in direct interaction with its practical orientation.