The Longest Road to Carnegie Hall

My name is Irena Portenko. I was born in Kyiv, trained at the Kyiv National Academy of Music, and have spent my life in music — as a concert pianist, as a teacher, and as someone who believes, deeply, that music is one of the few things that can hold the world together when everything else is falling apart.

I came to America years ago. I built a life here. And I have never stopped thinking about the city I came from.

The girls I am writing about today are students at the Kyiv Lysenko State Music Lyceum — the same school where I studied. I walked those same hallways. I practiced in those same rooms. I know what it means to be shaped by that place, by those teachers, by that standard of excellence. And I know what it feels like to stand on the Carnegie Hall stage for the first time — because I have stood there myself, for my New York debut, in a performance the New York Times called extraordinary.

That moment changed my life. I want these girls to feel it too.

Together with my dear colleague and co-founder Amanda Gundling, I created Unbreakable Harmony — a cultural diplomacy initiative born from the belief that the stage can do what diplomacy sometimes cannot: bring people together across distance, difference, and pain. Our project, Voices of Youth and Hope, is bringing the Kyiv Lysenko State Music Lyceum Chamber Girls' Choir to perform at Carnegie Hall on November 6, 2026 — alongside the Westchester Children’s Chorus and American artists. Ukrainian voices and American voices, sharing one stage, one program, one moment.

It is, we believe, exactly what this moment in history calls for.

Carnegie Hall has a saying: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice."

These girls have done the practicing. Now they need to make the journey.

They are students at a conservatory in Kyiv. They wake up, go to school, Because Ukrainian airspace is closed, there are no flights out of Kyiv.

So the journey begins with an overnight bus — 15 hours across the country to the Polish border, then an unpredictable wait at the crossing, then onward to Warsaw. By the time they board their transatlantic flight, they will have already traveled through the night. Then come nine more hours in the air.

They will land in a city they've never seen, shake off a journey most adults would find exhausting, and walk onto one of the most famous stages in the world.

That is the road to Carnegie Hall.

This is what we're raising money for — every mile of it.

Everything else is in place: the venue, the program, the partnerships, the rehearsals. What remains is making sure these young singers actually arrive.

And while they're here, we want to give them something beyond the concert. Halloween costumes on the streets of New York. A slice of pizza in Times Square. Central Park in the gold of autumn. New friendships with American kids their age. The kind of memories that belong to childhood — not to the news.

They have worked so hard for this. They deserve to feel, even for a few days, what it is like to be a kid in a city at peace — full of wonder, full of noise, full of life.

Help us give them that.

Every dollar goes directly to their travel costs — the bus, the border, the flight.

Unbreakable Harmony — Voices of Youth and Hope

November 6, 2026 · Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall · 7:30 PM

With gratitude — Prof. Irena Portenko, DMA