Viktoriia Vitrenko

Limbo is a vocal journey through liminality and an intensely personal project. Conceived by Viktoriia Vitrenko and developed with the Eclat Festival, it interrogates the stasis of waiting, exploring both poetic, speculative aspects and concrete, often unbearable manifestations. Composed mostly in late 2021, it is dedicated to Vitrenko’s friend and colleague, flutist Maria Kalesnikava, serving an eleven-year sentence in Belarus for her role in the 2020 protests.

Through commissioned vocal cycles by Agata Zubel, Alla Zagaykevych, Ying Wang, and Sven-Ingo Koch, alongside Maxim Shalygin’s existing work, Limbo delves into the suspension of those caught in-between—shaped by the uncertainty of Maria’s fate, the isolation of the pandemic, and the growing tensions leading to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Recorded in 2022, already amid the invasion, Limbo moves from the dark, jazz-inflected timbres of Zubel’s 3 Songs, to the whispers, Sprechgesang, and Ukrainian traditional singing of Zagaykevych’s Signs of Presence; through the bold gestures of Wang’s Illuminations to the bel canto and chanson of Koch’s Simple Songs & Songs of Pining. In the finale, Shalygin’s Songs of Holy Fools, the voice seems to hover on the edge of the physical.

Vitrenko’s dual role as vocalist and pianist blurs traditional boundaries, embracing the intimacy of singer-songwriter aesthetics. Rashad Becker’s mixing deepens this effect, crafting aural spaces that resist closure.