Pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi (34) still remembers his racing heartbeat when the dull rumble of Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns woke him up in Kyiv on the early morning of the Russian invasion. “Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a war,” he sighs, “in the middle of an event that my generation knew only from the history books.”
Of course, that war had been raging for eight years at the time, he says, since the Russians took Crimea and supported the separatists in the east. “But to us those skirmishes were far away, like a noise in the background. Although the atmosphere grew darker in recent weeks, and fear grew, no one – including me – expected the Russians to attack Kyiv as well. Such a scenario would be madness, and yet it happened.”
Front messages the Amsterdam Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ calls Baryshevskyi’s recital on Saturday night. A somewhat wry title for a pianist who sees music as an antidote to war, although it took some time to feel that again.
Inner silence
“In the first days we didn’t know what to do. Because the air raid alarm could go off at any moment, we slept in our clothes. The trains were overcrowded and the roads were clogged with cars. Many people fled to the west of the country. With wife and daughter I managed to get to the safer Lviv. We saw many people sink into lethargy, exhausted by the tensions. We were mostly angry and frustrated. I couldn’t play, couldn’t think straight. Our image of the future was shattered.”
Slowly life started again for Baryshevskyi and his family. They went to work in a volunteer center in the library in Lviv, collecting items for the frontline soldiers and tying camouflage nets on the floors. And gradually there was also mental space to make music again.
“Once behind the grand piano I realized – more than ever – how music can connect me with an inner silence, how it can bring peace to the heart. Sounds went deeper than usual. In the midst of the war, we felt fearful and fearless at the same time. Music lifted us – while it lasted – above the maelstrom of an alienating and ridiculous reality.”
Double life
Baryshevskyi left Ukraine with his family in March last year and ended up in Amsterdam, where his son was born. “Life is good here, I can give concerts here. Although we pay a price for that, the price of homesickness: the loss of loved ones who are in dire circumstances far away. I would like to play for them, for my father who does not want to leave Kyiv. We hope every day that we can return one day. Will it happen? I have a responsibility to provide my family with a safe place and security. And we have it here. But our thoughts are elsewhere, thousands of miles to the east. That double life hurts.”
The recital in the Muziekgebouw brings him a little closer to his country. The program contains a century of Ukrainian music history with work by four generations of composers: Boris Lyatoshinsky (1895-1968), Valentin Silvestrov (1937), Sviatoslav Luniov (1964) and Maxim Shalygin (1985).
“Lyatoshinsky is the father of the modern Ukrainian school of composers. He started out as a modernist, but fell prey to the anti-modernism campaigns of the Soviet dictatorship and had to ‘simplify’ his music. Yet both his early and late work are deep and moving at the same time. Luniov plays with all kinds of styles. I do parts of his cycle Mardongsin which he walks through music history, from the Middle Ages to the present.”
Powerful feelings
Luniov says he learned a lot from Silvestrov, who also likes to mirror his music to that of famous predecessors. “Although with Silvestrov that is a smaller circle of composers: Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin. Luniov’s landscape is larger, sometimes still and tender, other times raw and cruel. Silvestrov searches for beauty and melody, for weightlessness. For Luniov, tension is the most important ingredient of music.”
And then there is his contemporary Sjalygin, who lives in The Hague and who ‘brought’ Baryshevskyi to the Netherlands. “His music has powerful feelings and colors. Sometimes I have the feeling that while playing, a door suddenly swings open to another dimension. Music is at its best when listeners can get lost in it, that afterwards you don’t know exactly what happened to you, how long it took.”