Global Assist
Symphony Magazine
New York, NY
"Refugees often don't talk about refugee status; they don't want it to define them," says Lidiya Yankovskaya, founder and conductor of the Refugee Orchestra Project, an ensemble of top-level musicians from around the globe. "They want to define their own lives for who they are."
Yankovskaya, a Russian-American conductor who specializes in new music and operatic rarities and participated in the League of American Orchestras Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview, is a refugee herself.
Her family fled to the U.S. in the '90s to escape anti-Semitism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She founded the Refugee Orchestra Project in 2015 to raise money for Syrian aid but quickly discovered an additional important function for an orchestra of displaced musicians.
"These performances humanize the refugee community," she says. "Seeing people performing together on stage, hearing composers and performers share their stories with the audience, is a powerful thing."