Even before the current Russian invasion, Ukraine has had to battle hard to secure its own culture and musical identity, as Daniel Jaffé discovers
Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra conducted by its founder Keri-Lynn Wilson in July 2022
‘Riding under fire and rockets is a very interesting experience, but I do not wish it on anyone.’ So Yurii Chekan of the Kyiv Conservatory wrote to me earlier this year, recalling his fraught experience of escaping under Russian fire from his home in Vorzel, a small village outside Bucha. Having been trapped in their basement for a week, he and his family had made several attempts to escape: ‘It was very dangerous. We drove about 5km from home three times and came back three times. Fortunately, my son-in-law, who works in the Ukrainian army, told me about a safe path, and we finally came out of this hell. We are all alive, and this is the most important thing. I lost my library, all my notes, my sketches, but now my family and I are safe.’
The pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi also had to flee his Kyiv home as Russian shelling started. Once in Lviv, he was at first occupied with doing voluntary work, ‘cutting ribbons for camouflage nets, packing humanitarian aid packages of medication and clothes for both refugees and for the army. It took some time to understand whether music was needed at all now.’
The war, of course, has profoundly changed Baryshevskyi’s experience of performing: ‘It’s impossible to play in the same way – the war is always on your mind.’ Yet the result for him has been a re-engagement with what music can mean, as he discovered while giving a series of fundraising concerts in Lviv. One piece he played was Greenland, a 50-minute piano suite by the Ukrainian composer Alexey Shmurak (b1986). Premiered in Kyiv on 21 February, just two days before the invasion, the music now became an emotional conduit for Baryshevskyi: ‘I expressed from pain and anger to tears, to some kind of tenderness, and hope, and belief – so a lot of different things that were in my mind and heart.’
As Baryshevskyi realised, music’s ability to give expression to the innermost pain and desires of the heart, and the precious communion it creates between performer and listener, places it in the ‘front line’ as much as the soldiers defending his country. Hearing such performances is presumably the more poignant for Ukrainians when it involves music by their compatriots and forebears – particularly given Vladimir Putin’s repeated claim that Ukraine is a ‘fake country’ with no true identity or culture of its own.
