Sound-imaging and coloring in piano miniatures by Mykola Kolessa

The piano creativity of the famous Ukrainian artist ─ Mykola Kolessahas been considered through the prism of stylistic features of composer’swriting, sound-imaging artistic orientation, picturesque elements of musicallanguage and principles of its pictorial component.The dominant features of the individual creative thinking and style of thecomposer has been discovered, the way of their formation, influenced by thepersonal philosophical and aesthetic-artistic interests of the Lviv artist, hasbeen considered: an extraordinary admiration for his national folklore (inparticular Hutsul), visual arts (especially painting) and Ukrainian art ingeneral.Relying on the materials of many existing research works, in which theaspect of the problems of musical painting is considered, a number ofcompositions by Mykola Kolessa written for piano have been analyzed in thepresent 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 pianomusic of M. Kolessa and the pictorial and visual elements of the composer’sartistic thinking has been revealed through the analysis in the study of thepeculiarities 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 softwarevector.The obtained results are valuable not only from the point of view ofmusicology, but also first of all, for the development of the art of pianointerpretation of Ukrainian music in direct interaction with its practicalorientation.