Front messages: piano music from Ukraine

Ukrainian pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi is not only an excellent musician, the current circumstances have also made him a messenger. In all works on Baryshevskyi’s all-Ukrainian program, the disastrous war waged against his homeland resonates. The youngest, Maxim Shalygin (1985), has been living and working in the Netherlands for years. The most famous, Valentyn Silvestrov (1937), fled Kyiv shortly after the Russian invasion.

Borys Lyatoshynskyi (1895-1968) was Silvestrov’s teacher and one of the most important Ukrainian composers of the Soviet era. Baryshevskyi plays several movements from the extensive Mardongs cycle by Svyatoslav Lunyov (1964), Shalygin’s teacher. The cycle is inspired by a story of the same name by the Russian writer Victor Pelevin about the deep impression that certain people leave in the collective memory. All parts of this cycle are titled with a date of birth: ’16.(?)12.1770′, for example, refers to Beethoven, prophet of freedom, whose exact date of birth is uncertain.