"I dream about this choir every night!": How popularity divided the life of the Gomin choir into "before" and "after"

When in June 2025 video with the performance of the Lviv choir "Gomin" accidentally "flew" on TikTok and began to gain millions of views, none of the participants even had time to "open the champagne." They simply didn't have time. The next week they had to schedule an additional concert, a month later they had to organize an all-Ukrainian tour, and then a tour of Europe.
Now it's impossible to buy tickets for the choir's concert – everything is sold out until the end of 2025. "Gomin found itself in a situation familiar to rock bands after a hit on the charts, but not quite typical for Ukrainian academic music: tickets were selling out faster than they could print posters.
LIGA.net went behind the scenes of the choir's concert in Dnipro and visited them "at home" in the Lviv Organ Hall to learn more about the choir members, their lives after fame, and how it affected their income.

Vadym Yatsenko, 31, is the artistic director of the Gomin choir and its main recognizable face. He is also the principal pianist of the Lviv National Philharmonic. We meet Vadym on the street near the Lviv Organ Hall, and he looks rather hipster. He has a hat on his head and sneakers on his feet. Vadym has a tattoo on his arms with a phrase from a Beatles song and a symbol that reminds us of his six-year-old son.


"When you're 20, you dream of becoming the next Bernstein, one of the most famous conductors in history," says Vadym, "but then you don't understand how the world works. Now, when I'm over 30, I'm moving in small steps, but I set a goal and achieve it gradually. Music is not just my profession. I don't know how to do anything else. Now all days are similar to each other: you wake up early, get on a bus, and go to another city."
We managed to talk to Vadym almost by accident – he arrived in Lviv before the rest of the choir members, who were still returning from Odesa by train. Vadym found a ticket and took the opportunity to spend at least a day at home with his family.
Born and raised in a village in the Kyiv region, he has been playing music since childhood. From the age of four or five, he was already singing at village clubs on holidays. When he was six, he went to music school, and when he was nine, he went to the Kyiv Specialized Music School for Ten Years, where he studied and lived in a dormitory. Then came the conservatory, graduate school, and doctoral studies. "Sometimes it's hard for people to understand that music is a serious science, just like any other. My higher education lasted 11 years, from 2012 to 2023, when I defended my doctoral dissertation," says Vadym. At 23, he was already a conductor.

He joined Gomin a little over two years ago. At first, he was invited to a project in the organ hall of Lviv, and later to lead the choir. In the summer of 2025, Vadym unexpectedly made it famous, even for himself.
What is Gomin?
In fact, the Gomin choir is not young at all; it has been in existence in Lviv for several decades. It was founded in 1988 as a mixed group with male and female voices. In the early 2000s, the artistic director and the concept changed: the choir became exclusively male. "The choir's tasks were quite formal: government concerts, monument dedications, free performances in libraries, schools, and churches," says Taras Demko, director of the Lviv Organ Hall, of which the Gomin has been a part since 2023.

Taras and his colleague Ivan Ostapovych took over the organ hall in 2017. When he took over, it was a long-unrenovated building, where only connoisseurs came to organ concerts. Demko wanted to turn the organ hall into a full-fledged modern concert venue. He renovated it, created spaces for exhibitions and lectures. He structured the repertoire into clusters: classics, bestsellers, romance, and special events. He started collaborating with foreign conductors.
Today, the Lviv Organ Hall combines historic architecture with modern acoustic solutions. During the renovation, authentic paintings were preserved and an organ was installed. The 17th-century building, which was rebuilt in the 1960s, now hosts exhibitions and lectures, and recently opened an observation deck in its tower overlooking the panorama of Lviv.

At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, the organ hall team, like thousands of other people across the country, began volunteering. At the time, it seemed like the only way to be useful. But later, Lviv residents began to think: what can they give to Ukrainian society that others cannot?

"We had artistic education, we had a concert hall," says Taras Demko, director of the Lviv Organ Hall. "We were the first concert venue in Ukraine to resume work after the full-scale invasion began. We also started distributing Ukrainian music at the same time. In a few months, we collected three to four thousand pieces of Ukrainian music, created a website and a system that allowed us to instantly find the right pieces and send them to musicians from all over the world. In 2022, we fulfilled about 5,000 requests for Ukrainian sheet music. It was important because at that time everyone was talking about Ukraine, but foreign performers did not have the materials to play our music."

When Homin became a part of the Lviv Organ Hall in 2023, Demko immediately realized that the choir needed to change. So he began looking for a new artistic director who would offer his vision and bring these changes to life. That's how Vadym Yatsenko came to Gomin.
How Gomin works from the inside
Demko and Yatsenko were thinking about the new concept of the choir and almost immediately decided to make it a mixed choir again, so that women would sing in addition to men.
Yatsenko was in charge of personnel. He said goodbye to some of the old choristers and began holding open competitions for women and men. A professional commission was set up for the evaluation, and musicians from different cities were invited to join it. Among them were very well-known specialists-one of them, for example, recently headed the Lysenko Music Lyceum in Kyiv.

The auditions were like a real casting call: the choir members went on stage, sang, and the committee evaluated them. Some of the participants, Vadym says, even hired tutors to improve their skills before the competition. They signed contracts with the best ones. Under Vadym Yatsenko's leadership, the newly formed choir represented Ukraine at the International Choir Festival in Lund, Sweden, in October 2023. The repertoire has been diversified: in addition to classical works, the choir performs songs by Stepan Hyha, Kvitka Tsysyk, and other popular songs.
Now Gomin is 25 people: 12 girls and 13 boys. All of them live in Lviv, as they have to go to rehearsals every day and periodically go on tours.

In Lviv, the changes in the choir's format were met with tension and distrust:
"Lviv is a rather intimate small city where everyone knows everyone," says the director of the organ hall. "We were worried about how the public would react when we announced that the choir was no longer exclusively male. There was some tension for a while, but later people began to react positively. We had to find and show the documents of the founders, which confirm that the choir was originally mixed. We proved that with "Homon" as a male choir we performed almost all the repertoire that could be found."
The first year after the concept was updated was a period of search for the choir. The singers and conductors tried different programs, experimented with themes and presentation. On average, they gave five concerts a month, and two new programs were created almost every month.

This is how a series of concerts with different formats appeared: "Romance," where the choir sang by candlelight; "Bestsellers," which featured the public's favorite works; and "Exclusive," special events that were not performed anywhere else. For example, Gomin commissioned a new arrangement of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" from a Kharkiv composer By Vivaldi, where only human voices sounded instead of instruments. The concert was a sensation and sold out.
Gradually, the choir began to collaborate with various conductors and orchestras, including the Luhansk Philharmonic. Together they performed concerts with the organ and choristers. From 2023 to 2025, Gomin also reconstructed the operetta Pidhiryany by Mykhailo Verbytskyi. It was once a real hit of the nineteenth century, performed hundreds of times throughout Europe, but with the advent of the Bolsheviks it was simply erased from history. Gomon found the old sheet music, ordered an orchestration, and brought this music back to the stage for the first time.
Another important step was the staging of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, translated into Ukrainian and made especially for the choir, which was an hour-long baroque opera with a live performance.
How "Gomin" woke up to popularity
Taras Demko says that tickets to the This Choir, That Choir program, which featured the same song by Stepan Hyha that everyone saw on TikTok, always sold well. Therefore, they did not invest much in its promotion, trying to advertise other, more niche programs. Moreover, it was at these particular Gomon concerts that a ban on photography and video recording was in effect until June 2025. Suddenly, the organ hall decided to change its approach: they allowed filming and posted a video of the concert on June 24.

The video shows the band with Yatsenko at the helm performing the song "This Dream" by Stepan Higa in a jazz arrangement by Yevhen Malyarevsky. In the first hour, the post received more than 20,000 views, and by the end of the day, more than a million.
The video instantly went viral on social media, and in just a day, the choir turned from a well-known group in narrow musical circles into an all-Ukrainian phenomenon. "Gomin immediately began to be invited to concerts in different cities of Ukraine and abroad. In just five days, ten concerts were held at the Lviv Opera House, and it was impossible to get tickets for them, which used to cost 100 hryvnias.
The choir team realized that they had to act quickly and announced additional concerts within a few days. Tickets began to fly, and by June the entire season was sold out.

Nowadays, the choir's artistic director, Vadym Yatsenko, can rarely afford to stay at home with his wife and son for just a few days. The choir's life is now one of constant travel from city to city, sleeping on buses and spending hours on trains.
Yatsenko says that thanks to TikTok and sold-out shows in Ukrainian cities, he has become recognized on the street. People often come up to him to say hello and take pictures, and Yatsenko doesn't feel any other "side effects" of his popularity: he lives in a rented apartment, takes his son to music school, and works two jobs. He says that he has only gotten more work, but hasn't felt anything else.
Is culture not profitable?
Gomon's performance schedule is tight. They travel around Ukraine every day, sometimes giving two concerts a day. In November, they will go on a tour of Europe, covering 17 cities in eight countries. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of comments on the posters on Homon's Instagram: "There are a lot of people waiting for you in the US," "Will there be a concert in Spain?", "When is Prague?".
The popularity has indirectly affected the earnings of young choristers. Salary pricing in the music sector is determined by state coefficients; the basic salary of cultural workers depends on the status of the institution: an ordinary municipal choir receives a minimum salary; a choir with academic status has a double rate; national choirs receive ×4, and "nationally honored" choirs receive another 20% more.
"Gomin has the status of an academic ensemble, so its members receive double the minimum rate rather than the minimum. Although the coefficient did not formally increase with the rise in popularity, the demand for concerts, tours, and invitations to perform on the road allowed the choristers to receive additional fees and bonuses. However, there is still not enough money, so most choristers combine Gomin with other jobs.
The budget of the Lviv Organ Hall for 2025 is UAH 17 million. This amount includes all expenses: salaries, energy bills, building maintenance, and minor repairs. Before Gomon joined it, the hall's budget was half as much, as was the number of its full-time employees.

"The organ hall, of which Gomin is a part, earns more than half of its budget on its own," says Demko. "In 2024, we earned almost UAH 9 million, which is more than 50% of the total annual budget. For comparison, in most concert halls around the world, their own revenues usually do not exceed 15% of the budget, such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, or the Berlin Philharmonic."
The organ hall's budget allocates UAH 600,000-700,000 per month for the Gomin choir. On average, the choir gives four to five concerts a month, not including tours. This is in addition to several other social events, such as participation in ceremonies, days of mourning, or cemetery funerals.
Gomon's concerts also support soldiers at the frontline: the first million was donated to the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine in August this year, and the second collection is underway, where the choir plans to raise UAH 10 million for the needs of the Armed Forces.
"We see a huge mission: to perform Ukrainian repertoire, popularize culture and support the army," says Vadym Yatsenko, "Every concert is a unity with the audience. The emotions are always incredible, even when you have to sing in a shelter, as it was in Odesa. Several hundred people sang songs with us in the shelter of the Philharmonic during the alarm."
How Gomin keeps the wave of popularity going
The Gomin choir doesn't rely on luck or that their popularity through social media will last forever. Instead, it works like clockwork and strikes while the iron is hot. It actively uses social media to maintain interest, give emotions, and show a live process.
"Classical musicians and choristers used to take social media lightly and didn't want to 'entertain' the audience," says Demko, "They say we are musicians, we have higher education, we have diplomas. But now it's changing. Even looking at TikTok, you can see that other choirs are actively working in their communication channels, adding retro songs to their repertoire, and being creative."

To reach a stable audience, you also need to plan your advertising properly, and cultural projects often have problems with their advertising budget.
"The advertising budget in business is 20-25% of the total money," says Demko, "The same goes for the website, social media, and social media. Choirs have never even thought about it before.
Instead of "pulling" a tour to different Ukrainian cities on their own with all the logistical hassles, Gomin chose a simpler way and established cooperation with professional concert operators.
***
Hundreds of well-dressed Dnipro residents, many of them wearing embroidered shirts, rush to the Philharmonic before a concert by Gomon in Dnipro. People are talking to each other and are determined to have a good time. There are no empty seats in the hall. Five minutes before the beginning, the audience applauds, inviting the choristers to the stage.

At this moment, backstage, the choristers are finishing preparing for the concert. The girls in the dressing rooms are fixing their hair and discussing the new jewelry they're wearing today, and the guys are exchanging jokes backstage. There are several bottles of Pepsi, bouquets of flowers from the previous concert, and KFC napkins scattered around the backstage area – apparently, some of the choir members ordered a snack.
Before going on stage, the group gathers in a circle, and one chorister tells a short funny story that happened to him that day. Some people find it very funny, others just smile. Then the participants hold hands and say together the chant "Gomin-drone, gomin-drone!". This is their tradition before every performance. And then they go on stage.
After an hour and a half of the concert, all the listeners are no longer sitting, but standing, singing along with the choir a song that unites everyone under any circumstances – "Chervona Ruta" sounds.

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