Mykola Hobdych

Choral conductor Mykola Hobdych is best known as the founder and director of the Kyiv Chamber Choir. He has researched, edited, performed, and recorded many hidden monuments of Ukrainian choral music. Hobdych was born in the small town of Bytkiv, in the Carpathian Mountains in southwestern Ukraine, on March 28, 1961. He graduated from the Drohobych Music School and then went on to the Kyiv Conservatory, where he studied with V.T. Chuba. For a time, he worked as a choirmaster with the Levko Revutsky Men's Choir and the Academic Choir "Dumka." In 1990, Hobdych joined with a group of other Kyiv Conservatory graduates to form the Kyiv Chamber Choir. Also known by its Russian name, Kiev Chamber Choir, the group was successful from the start, winning major competitions such as the International Robert Schumann Competition in Zwickau, Germany, in 1992, and the Hajnówka International Festival of Sacred Music in Poland, and the International Choral Competition in Sligo, Ireland, in 1993. The Kyiv Chamber Choir is regarded as Ukraine's top choir. Hobdych and the Kyiv Chamber Choir have made some 40 albums, many of them on Ukrainian labels. An early effort distributed in the West was a recording of Tchaikovsky's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 41, released on the Naxos label in 1997. Hobdych and the choir have often recorded for Ukraine's Origen Music label but have also appeared on AZ Music and, in 2010 and 2012, on the boutique ECM label, in a pair of albums devoted to composer Valentin Silvestrov. Hobdych has also conducted many works from outside the Ukrainian tradition, but as his career developed, he became more and more interested in Ukraine's largely hidden musical legacy. He researched, edited, performed, and recorded a variety of Ukrainian works dating as far back as the Middle Ages, with the result that some 40 percent of the music on his recordings were world premieres. In 2019, Hobdych and the Kyiv Chamber Choir released the album Sacred Treasures: Masterpieces of Ukrainian Choral Music - XV-XIX Centuries on Origen Music; in 2022, the release became a best-seller.
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