Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.
Waiting 20 years to complete an opera that is dear to your heart demands a little, well, patience.
In a perfect world, Harvard University would call and offer a five-month fellowship to finish the work.
But what are the odds?
If you're a well-known composer of Ukrainian heritage and the fellowship is from Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, they're likely stacked in your favor.
Ask Virko Baley, UNLV's composer in residence, who got the call in April.
Would he be interested in completing "Hunger," his opera based on the 1932 Ukraine famine?
Of course he would.
It takes weeks of solid daily work to dig into an opera - even a 90-minute, one-act opera. The Petro Jacyk Distinguished Research Fellowship gives him that and more.
"As long as I keep my wine intake to a minimum, I'm sure I'll be fine," Baley says with an understated smile.
It's hard not to like the 68-year-old composer and conductor. He's generously conversational, witty and inspired. He'll gladly walk you through his music and research libraries and share his encyclopedic knowledge on new music, old music and poetry.
Between teaching, conducting and completing commissioned works, Baley has been thinking about "Hunger" since Bohdan Boychuck's libretto was completed in the 1980s.
Since arriving at UNLV in 1970 as a piano professor, Baley has written two symphonies, chamber music, duets, various instrumental combinations and concertos, most of which are performed nationally and internationally - whether it's for the New Juilliard Ensemble, a string quartet in Iowa or a New York trombonist. His two film scores are "Swan Lake: The Zone," a poetic Ukrainian film reflecting Soviet oppression, and "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa."
The National Symphony Orchestra commissioned him to write a chamber music piece following its residency in Nevada last year. Contracts have yet to be signed, but if the work reflects his varied repertoire, it will be a tad avant garde, edgy and rhythmically complicated.
"There's a little bit of a joke when Virko's going to write you a piece," says Stephen Caplan, principal oboist with the Las Vegas Philharmonic and UNLV oboe professor. "It's going to be really difficult and you're going to get it at the last minute."
He described Baley's unique style: "It's a complicated sound, and that turns some people off. There are layers there. It's something you're not going to get listening to for the first time. But with Virko, it's worth it. You go from being mystified to a real emotional core. And find that it's not so cerebral after all."
Although definitively American, Ba ley's Ukrainian roots run as deep musically as they do professionally.
How much does his heritage influence his work?
"You are what you eat," he says. "It comes out sometimes overtly. Other times, it's more of a fingerprint. There's no attempt on my part to try to deny it, mitigate it, subvert it."
Born in 1938 in Radekhiv, Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union, Baley's childhood was a nomadic one, directly influenced by the war around him. The family came to the United States in 1949 and settled in Los Angeles. Baley, a pianist, graduated from the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, and in 1970 moved to Las Vegas to teach piano at UNLV.
Composition is his love: "Somehow one must amuse oneself."
When writing solo works, Baley says he likes to write for particular players in mind: "I know them. I can write for their strengths. But frankly, just to be mean, I'll write for their weaknesses."
Despite the joking, Baley's music is not all brash and in your face. His "Orpheus Singing" for oboe and string quartet is melodic.
His harshness, atonality, angularity and aggressiveness is "mellowing" with age, Baley says, and the music he's writing now is more giving. "There are works of mine now that are extremely lyrical and melodic."
And despite its dark themes, his first symphony has an exuberant sound.
Then there is "Treny," a series of four works for cello and soprano based on the work of a Polish poet whose young daughter had died. Baley wrote it amid his own loss: His mother had recently died, as had his oldest friend in Las Vegas and the wife of a good friend. The work, which Baley describes as a metaphor for suffering, is unmistakably somber.
Many of the composer's contemporary pieces reference Ukrainian folk music.
Tymish Holowinsky, executive director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, says the institute is pleased Baley accepted the fellowship, referring to Baley as a "highly respected composer" and "distinguished musician and musicologist."
While at Harvard, Baley will also present an outline of 20th century Ukrainian music.
At UNLV Baley is working to expand the eight-year-old composition department, which will host a composers conference this spring and bring in Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky from Cornell University, Grawemeyer Award winner George Tsontakis from Bard College and Paul Chihara from UCLA as faculty.
Meanwhile, he's looking forward to finishing his opera.
"The way you start is sharpening pencils; you waste a lot of time, you doodle. You welcome interruption; you're not supposed to answer the phone, but when it rings you rush to it."
Fortunately for Baley fans, he sometimes just lets it ring.
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