Swedish king and queen attend opening of Ukrainian Spring festival

The fourth European Festival: Ukrainian Spring has opened in Stockholm – a celebration of Ukrainian and European music, poetry, art and cinema. The opening ceremony was attended by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and Queen Silvia.

Source: press release provided to UP.Kultura

Details: This year's event opened with a joint concert by string players from the Lviv National Philharmonic and musicians from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra Academy.

The Ukrainian-Swedish orchestra, conducted by Roman Reznik, performed a work by contemporary Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi at the Konserthuset Stockholm concert hall, as well as Ukrainian classical music by Maxim Berezovsky, Dmytro Bortnianskyi, Bohdana Froliak and Myroslav Skoryk.

Natalya Pasichnyk, a concert pianist and the festival's artistic director, said: "This is about the systematic and long-term presence of Ukrainian culture in Europe. We are working to ensure that Ukrainian music is perceived not as something external, political, or an optional extra, but as an organic part of Europe's cultural heritage. Even now, it often remains outside the main repertoire of major institutions. This is also about changing their perspective so that Ukrainian music is included in their programmes naturally, on an equal footing with others."

The concert opened with Maxim Berezovsky's Symphony in C major, which was written in the 18th century and only discovered in the early 2000s in the archive of an Italian aristocratic family.

"For the first 20 years of my life, I never heard some of the music being played this evening because it was banned," said Svitlana Zalishchuk, Ukraine's ambassador to Sweden. "The composers were persecuted and their works were prohibited. Today we are rediscovering this music. Ukraine is not a backyard. We are a garden. And tonight, we invite you to walk through this beautiful garden."

European Festival: Ukrainian Spring 2026 will run until 24 April. As part of the festival, 17 events will take place at leading cultural venues in Stockholm, including the Royal Opera, the Historical Museum and the Royal College of Music. The full festival programme is available on this website.

The festival is organised by the Ukrainian Institute in Sweden in cooperation with the Embassy of Ukraine in Sweden and nearly 40 cultural partners.

This year's theme is "Contra Spem Spero" ("Against all hope, I hope"), a line from a poem by Lesia Ukrainka.

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