ANGEL: An Instrumental Opera in Three Acts

The Lyatoshynsky Trio travels from Vienna to The Hague for this concert, sharing the stage with pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi in a full-evening programme in three acts with two intervals: an opera without words.

An angel hovers over the evening. ANGEL by Maxim Shalygin opens the concert: music of weightless, austere beauty, as if an angel were watching from a great height over everything we do. The Lyatoshynsky Trio opens with this work and then plays the Second Piano Trio by Borys Lyatoshinsky, the father of modern Ukrainian music. He wrote it in 1942, in evacuation, far from his city of Kyiv, which lay under fire along with the rest of Ukraine. In the trio, we hear the music of a composer who refuses to break: unyieldingly strong, yet deeply meditative.

Antonii Baryshevskyi opens the second act with Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, a declaration of love written when the young composer was a student, passionately in love. Then follows Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schoenberg, after the poem by Richard Dehmel. In a moonlit forest, a woman confesses that she is carrying another man’s child. The man replies that their love will make the child his own; the cold night turns from darkness to radiant light. A masterpiece of forgiveness and redemption, heard in the intimate version for piano trio.

The third act brings the Fetus Etudes by Maxim Shalygin, one of the most arresting piano cycles of this decade. The final three études were written after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in close collaboration with Antonii Baryshevskyi, who fled to the Netherlands in 2022. The titles say it all: TO ALL ALIVE, TO ALL IN LOVE and TO ALL RESURRECTED. At the heart of the cycle, the angel returns: the circle of the evening closes.