Yevhen Fedorovyč Stankovyč was born in Szolyva on September 19, 1942, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary.
In 1962-63, he studied composition with Adam Soltys at the Lviv Conservatory, and from 1965 to 1970, with Borys Ljatošyns'kyj and Myroslav Skoryk at the Kyiv Conservatory. He worked as a music publisher, was the president of the Union of Ukrainian Composers, and has been a professor of composition at the Kyiv Conservatory, now the National Academy of Music of Ukraine, since 1998.
In 2017, he served as the head of the organizing committee for the Ukrainian Olympiad "The Voice of the Country."
Yevhen Stankovych is a central figure in contemporary Ukrainian music. A prolific composer, since 1966, he has written six symphonies, operas "When the Fern Blooms" and Rustici, six ballets, a large number of works in the genres of oratorio, chamber vocal music, and chamber instrumental music, as well as incidental music for up to 6 musical theatre performances and over 100 films.
From his earliest compositions, Stankovych declared himself a composer of dramatic temperament, not averse to emotional risk. The composer's elaborate polyphonic textures and meditative lyricism are reminiscent of the rigorous instrumental style of Baroque music. At the same time, the full-bodied effects, with their obvious post-Romantic coloring, give the music warmth and expressiveness. His music is remarkable in many respects, showing his emotional freedom, consummate technical mastery, and flexibility of form.
Yevhen Stankovych has received numerous major awards. The UNESCO World Tribune selected his Chamber Symphony No. 3 as one of the 10 best works of 1985. He has been awarded multiple prizes in Ukraine, including the country's highest award for artistic creativity, the Taras Shevchenko State Prize.
The composer's works have been performed in Canada, the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, China, the Philippines, and Yugoslavia, as well as performances in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. In January 1992, he served as a senior juror for the first Canadian Contemporary Music Competition held in Winnipeg and appeared at contemporary music festivals in Germany and Poland. In 1996, he was a composer-in-residence in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland.
Yevhen Stankovych is an academician of the National Academy of Arts, chairman of the Faculty of Composition of the Kyiv National Academy of Music, and a member of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize Committee. He is the former chairman of the Union of Ukrainian Composers, a People's Artist of Ukraine, and a Hero of Ukraine.
Stankovych's Symphony No. 4, "Lyrical Symphony," composed two years after "The Heroic," in 1977, returns to the string world of the "Large Symphony." This work, scored for sixteen solo strings in one extended movement, was, by Stankovych's admission, a turn towards neo-romanticism and a deliberate abandonment of the use of "templates" (harmonic or rhythmic). The construction of the work is ingenious in the distribution of melodies on the strings: each musician has a melody of a different character that he must often reproduce without reference to the rest of the ensemble - sometimes, the conductor is instructed to conduct only one or two instruments, leaving the others to play independently. But this careful layering of simultaneous (horizontal) musical lines produces a beautiful and rich (vertical) harmonic texture.
The primary thematic material of the Symphony evokes the gentle lyricism of Scriabin; however, this is far from pastiche, and Stankovych employs a variety of formal and stylistic approaches to create the work. The structure, for example, is a synthesis of elements of sonata form, variation form, and rondo – yet the result, which increases in intensity and decreases again, is cyclical. This intricate approach paradoxically allows him to create music with a feeling of extreme freedom and an improvisatory quality. As the title suggests, it is a piece in which the primary force seems to be a beautiful, long-breathed lyricism.