Forbidden Music from Kyiv

Our Artist in Residence and multiple competition winner Antonii Baryshevskyi dedicates a solo recital to avant-garde music from 1960s Kyiv, created by a group of composers whom the Hungarian György Kurtág praised admiringly for their unique, distinctive style.

Valentin Silvestrov and a group of young fellow composers studied scores and recordings of Western avant-garde music in total secrecy, as these were strictly forbidden under the Soviet regime. This inspired them to develop a revolutionary musical language and to write masterpieces that are rarely heard today, but for which Baryshevskyi is a passionate advocate. It would be hard to find a better pianist for this unique repertoire.

These compositions, which at the time could only be performed in private, represent a crucial moment in Ukrainian musical history: the moment when composers, in Silvestrov’s words, “broke out of the closed cathedral of conventional music.”