Her solo concerts and band projects have brought her to many festivals and concert halls in Germany, France, Israel, Afghanistan, and the USA. Sadovska has received a scholarship grant from the Earth Foundation in New Yorkm, a Künstlerstipendium from Staatskanzlei NRW / Germany, and a Fulbright fellowship, and was a scholar at the Princeton Atelier, a multidisciplinary artists program curated by Toni Morrison at Princeton University. She lives with her husband and two children in Cologne, Germany.
About Chernobyl. The Harvest, Sadovska writes:
" Chernobyl. The Harvest is a composition for one voice and string quartet, based on ancient ceremonial music of northern Ukraine and contemporary sound scales. In this‘ pagan requiem’ I used the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl as a starting point to experiment with destruction and creation of musical structures and stories.
“ I remember very well the days of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl. Nobody told the truth about what happened. The officials tried to convince us that they had everything under control, the workers celebrated their labor days in Kiev as if nothing happened two days before, and the evacuated people thought they get a free vacation for a few days. Nobody told them that they would never be back to their homes. Chernobyl is a strong symbol of disaster, of individual and collective tragedies. And it is still reality. The problem is not solved; the destroyed reactor blocks are just locked in a concrete coffin that slowly comes apart.
“ I started with the working title Chernobyl – a pagan requiem, and in the process of creating the piece I realized that this term doesn ' t fully represent what I wrote. Chernobyl. The Harvest is dealing with memory of death, and yes, some of the material I use can lead us to pagan cultures. But I put the main emphasis on the question of how people get on with life after facing death and destruction. We harvest what we have sown, and we have to learn to live with it. Also I didn ' t want to stick too tightly to a musical form. I see myself more as a singing storyteller than a composer. The harvest songs I integrated in the piece were used by the farmer women to push the coming rain clouds away while they were working in the fields. Rain can destroy the harvest. After the Chernobyl catastrophe, we all were afraid of the clouds delivering radioactivity.
“ Chernobyl. The Harvest is arranged in four parts with a total length of 20 min. The first part draws a picture of a frozen landscape. I use a widow’ s song to evoke the atmosphere of the alienation zone that still exists around Chernobyl, with its empty cities and abandoned villages.
“ The second part is like a danse macabre based on several ritual songs and text fragments of official announcement of the evacuation plan.
“ The third part follows the open structure of a lamentation ceremony in the Polesia region, where Chernobyl is located. On one special day of the year, women gather to lament at the graves of their ancestors. The words and the musical pattern they sing are improvised and very personal. Together they create a tremendous polyphony of mourning. I sing the names of evacuated villages that are now covered by the grasses.