There were times that Olga Amelkina-Vera couldn’t bear looking at the TV.
News from home was desperate last December: Kiev, Ukraine, not far from her native Belarus, was erupting in violence and bloodshed.
“There were all these traumatic events in Kiev with all the people protesting and these demonstrations,” the classical guitarist and composer recalled.
And then, early this year, government troops opened fire on a group of protestors, killing 100 of them.
“I couldn’t watch the fighting live, but after all of that happened and the regime crumbled and the president fled, there were vigils that the population was holding in Kiev in the main square,” Amelkina-Vera said during a phone call from her Plano, Texas, home this week.
As she watched TV reports of the square filling with people singing and making speeches, she felt emotionally connected.
“It was a very cathartic experience for the whole nation” she said, one that found its way into a piece she was composing at the time for guitarist Matt Palmer.
On Friday, Palmer will perform “The Heaven’s Hundred” for the first time in Tucson to open the Sixth International Tucson Guitar Festival, which runs through Nov. 8. The UA alumnus played the world premiere in June in California.
The piece takes its name from the Heavenly Hundred, the 100 protestors killed in the Kiev square. It’s an 11-minute piece with emotional swings, from somber to chaotic to reflective. You can hear nods to the rustic folk songs and hymns sung by protestors before the tempo tilts and you hear what sounds like a spray of gunfire.
“Moods change and they flow from one to the other,” said the 38-year-old Amelkina-Vera, who performs with her husband, Fernand Vera, as the Kithara Duo.
Amelkina-Vera, an in-demand classical guitar composer, is making her first trip to Tucson. She has lived in Texas since 1997, when she moved to the States to go to school.
In addition to performing and composing, she also teaches guitar part-time at Southern Methodist University and Collin College, where her husband heads the guitar program.
The Sixth Annual Guitar Festival, a coproduction with the UA School of Music and Tucson Guitar Society, also includes performances by Czech Republic guitarist Pavel Steidl next Thursday and Duo Assad: Sérgio & Odair Assad on Nov. 7.
