This spring, the piano album Music of Kharkiv appeared on streaming platforms. It was recorded by Ukrainian pianist Maksym Shadko, a Kharkiv native and soloist of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine. Produced by the Ukrainian Classical Music Foundation and curated by Olya Lozynska, the album brings together works by four Kharkiv composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Valentyn Bibik (1940–2003), Volodymyr Ptushkin (1949–2022), Oleksandr Shchetynsky (b. 1960), and Serhii Yushkevych (b. 1953).
Knowing a city can be as difficult as knowing a person. One may spend hours wandering its streets, overhearing the conversations of passersby, letting one’s gaze drift across rooftops—yet still never stumble upon the portal into that looking-glass world where the local rituals of social interaction are encoded and where the details of the topos play a whimsical game among themselves. The detective-philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that the city makes it possible to discern the precise image of everything that lives within it. But how not to get lost in its ciphers and codes—especially when the city is as many-faced as Kharkiv?
Indeed, it is all too easy to lose oneself in the urban labyrinth of plots, characters, stories, and symbolic structures that draws us in when we try to approach the “Kharkiv text.” The Olympus and Golgotha of the executed artistic pantheon of the 1920s. The Ukrainian Heidelberg; a city of unbreakable reinforced concrete; a city of workshops, parks, fountains, and benches. A tragic museum where “punk music, poetry of despair, and proletarian melancholy ought to have been born.” A city of chimerical metaphors, where “herds of southern clouds wander and a true tropical rain falls.” A frontier, a fortress, an interfluve, a province. So what, then, is Kharkiv really like?
This city-palimpsest is so diverse, so multilayered, and yet over the past hundred years it has been so tempered by the fires of terror, occupations, and wars that behind the armor of its “reinforced-concrete” image, one would hardly suspect any fragility, delicacy, or tenderness. But if you take the time to listen closely to the voices through which its genii loci speak, a Kharkiv will emerge that you might not have expected to see—or to hear.
It is precisely in this way—sensitive and polyphonic—that the album Music of Kharkiv reveals itself. Maksym Shadko first presented a monographic Kharkiv program to audiences in Lviv, where it was successfully performed and, at the same time, recorded in January 2023 in the Mirror Hall of the Lviv National Opera (sound engineer: Dmytro Muchychka).
“At that time, Kharkiv was a city of blackouts and air raid alerts (the longest lasting twenty-six hours straight), mercilessly shelled, wounded, destroyed—a city-fortress and a frontier,” emphasizes Kharkiv musicologist Yuliia Nikolaievska, author of the release’s musicological annotations. “It seemed that more than anything, the city longed for silence and at least one night without alerts. <…> This program was born as a dream.”
After its Lviv premiere, the program was performed twice in Kyiv—at the Vere Music Hub (April 2023) and at the Bouquet Kyiv Stage Festival (August 2024)—as well as once in Kharkiv itself, at Kharkiv Music Fest (May 2023). In this way, it traversed George Shevelov’s sacred “axis from west to east,” and quite deservedly earned the performer the Levko Revutsky Prize in 2025. Since then, the digital album has become available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, allowing listeners to immerse themselves in Kharkiv’s aura from anywhere in the world.
Valentyn Bibik
The first steps into the album’s soundscape—and the listener is enveloped by a gentle wave of calm and light. This is the music of Valentyn Bibik, the most prominent Kharkiv representative of the 1960s generation in Ukrainian music, a composer whose works are heard today far less often than they deserve. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that not many musicians are yet ready to take on the responsibility of becoming co-authors of Bibik’s works—for this is precisely how the composer defined the role of performers in his music, regarding creative collaboration with them as inseparable from realizing the musical conception.
Valentyn Bibik called the piano the warmest, most expressive, and most humane instrument, and he featured it in nearly a hundred of his works. For Maksym Shadko, by his own admission, Bibik’s music was “love at first listening.” It is not hard to believe: the composer’s works have a way of captivating from the very first sounds and holding the listener until the aftertaste of the final silence.
Although Valentyn Bibik’s piano legacy, alongside its lyricism, is also marked by tension, drama, and expression, for the album the pianist nevertheless chose perhaps his most positive works. The one-movement Fifth Sonata, Op. 46 (1982) is a unique piece that the composer, according to legend, described in private conversations with colleagues as music about happiness. Such a “hidden” program presents quite a challenge for the performer. Today, we all know—unfortunately!—how to speak about pain. But how not to go astray in tone when it comes to moments of happiness?
The text of the Fifth Sonata is concise, transparent, almost minimalist: a bundle of sounds and echoes woven into short motifs, melodic lines with overtone layering, and second-interval vibrations that swell into sonorous chordal patches—cautious at first, but later resolute. Such music demands a pianist with a special, delicate touch, one capable of expressing fragility, vulnerability, and the priceless warmth within us that we—often only in retrospect—call happiness.
This is a virtuosity of a special kind: to remain in constant aural concentration, to distinguish the subtlest layers of sound that lie extraordinarily close to one another, to employ an almost imperceptible pedaling attuned to the smallest nuances, to govern the time in which music is born—on the boundary between fading away and the anticipation of sound.
The Six Intermezzi, Op. 57 (1985), which organically continue the mood of the Fifth Sonata, can easily be imagined as brief meditations on balance and inner harmony. As in the Sonata, there are remarkably few notes here, and much of the time is filled by the spaces between them, ceaselessly pulsing with echoes and overtones. The performer’s path runs between the Scylla of banality and the Charybdis of excessive intellectualization. Yet Maksym Shadko skillfully steers clear of both, leaving the listener with a sense of sincerity as well as depth in this music.
To put it in visual terms, the pianistic concision of Valentyn Bibik, as presented on the album, is associated not with the graphic sharpness of a pencil (though linearity, of course, predominates here), but rather with ink applied by a damp brush on cardboard, spreading in barely perceptible half-tone transitions of a single color.
The same shades and half-tones can also be seen in the work of Kharkiv artist Kostiantyn Zorkin, which was used as the album’s illustration. In it, the color gray pulses—the color of calm, of the solid walls of Derzhprom, of the modernist buildings of architects Oleksiy Beketov and Oleksandr Rzhepishevsky, and of the quiet streets of Kharkiv’s city center, on one of which Valentyn Bibik spent most of his life.
Volodymyr Ptushkin
Bibik’s final intermezzo fades away somewhere in the contra-octave, and from that silence a new movement is born: Introduction and Toccata (1991) by Volodymyr Ptushkin, a work whose dynamism—if not outright contrasting—at least casts the other tracks of the album in a different light. Ptushkin himself is emblematic of Kharkiv: he devoted thirty years to his work as music director of the drama theater (1972–2002) and to teaching at the University of the Arts (1992–2022), where he remained until the very last days of his life.
The years spent in the theatrical milieu had a profound impact on the composer: even his non-programmatic instrumental works are imbued with theatricality, stage-like expressiveness, and an almost cinematographic quality. Something similar can be observed in the “plot” of the composition on the album, where the unhurried, improvisatory unfolding of the introduction is suddenly interrupted by the energetic, purposeful thematism of the toccata.
Introduction and Toccata is an example of vivid concert music that combines the baroque duality of genres with a range of contemporary compositional techniques. In this work, Maksym Shadko has the opportunity to demonstrate not only the intellectual but also the purely technical side of his virtuosity. The treatment of the piano as a percussion instrument, characteristic of the toccata as a genre, is here combined with a full, almost orchestral sound.
A fast tempo, cheerfulness, clarity, a touch of humor, and plenty of energy—it is obvious that this is music about youth. The story of the piece’s creation confirms this: Introduction and Toccata was written as a compulsory work for one of the youth performance competitions. Yet in the context of the album, this music emerges not only as a symbol of the vitality and will to win of young virtuosos, but also as a hymn to Kharkiv—a city of “young youth” and of “young women with blue transparent eyelashes,” a city unique, inimitable, and brimming with life.
Oleksandr Shchetynsky
“He paradoxically combined simplicity with sophistication and non-triviality”—this is how composer Oleksandr Shchetynsky described the music of his mentor Valentyn Bibik. Yet this apt statement can, to some extent, also be applied to Shchetynsky’s own work. A Kharkiv native, he is today primarily a Kyiv-based artist. His music is consistently highly imaginative (even when that imagery is not reflected in the titles of his works), often engages with spiritual themes, and is reflective, minimalist, and even romantic—though without romantic stereotypes.
The suite Music of Kharkiv (1981/1989) by Oleksandr Shchetynsky, composed during his student years, became the foundation for the concept and overall mood of the album—a kind of magnet pulling the program toward meditative, luminous, and optimistic content. Its four movements, with simple titles (“Movement,” “Echo,” “Elegy,” “Song”), unfold a picture far removed from the typical urban image. Once again, Kharkiv emerges here not as a manifesto of constructivism, but as a city of dreams, half-tones, and tranquility.
In Movement there is no bustle—only diatonic swaying and the quiet flow of the river of urban life; in Echo there is ample space, resonating with the overtones of evening or morning chimes sounding above the rooftops. Elegy and Song are wrapped in melancholy and gentle sadness: they seem like a premonition of nostalgia for a city that is difficult, ambiguous, yet one’s own.
On this Kharkiv journey, Maksym Shadko once again succeeds in preserving a balance between meditation, simplicity, and sincerity of intonation. There is something therapeutic in the sound of the suite: both in the calming rhythmic and intonational repetitions of the musical fabric, and in the subconscious sense of quiet confidence in a city that will always carry the love of its inhabitants.
Serhii Yushkevych
Serving as a kind of postscript to the album are two piano transcriptions by Serhii Yushkevych, the Kharkiv pianist who made his mark at the renowned Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium (1975). In his compositional work, he favors the art of transcription: his collection Badinerie (1999) is a refined mosaic of sixteen arrangements of classical music “hits.” Alongside transcriptions of works by Bach, Chopin, and Bizet, the collection also includes the Little Ukrainian Suite of four arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs, two of which became part of Music of Kharkiv.
Astringent and, in the words of Maksym Shadko, “surrealistically allegorical,” is the polytonal arrangement of the lullaby Kotyku sirenkyi (Gray Kitten). Yet the listener does not remain in a haze of uncertainty: the album concludes in pure radiance with the famous Shchedryk, which in Serhii Yushkevych’s arrangement acquires a special timbral magic. Over the course of forty-five minutes, the performer, together with the composers, offers the most diverse answers to the question: “What is Kharkiv like?” And among the dozens of answers—each of them correct—the final word is nonetheless: Ukrainian.
Silence, Tenderness, and Hope
Today Kharkiv is truly a frontier, a fortress, and a city of reinforced concrete. But it is not only that. “I decided to present Kharkiv as a city of hope,” says Maksym Shadko of the album—and he has clearly succeeded. On his side were not only his mastery as a performer, but also a flawlessly chosen and carefully structured program, whose works—each a gem in its own right—are linked by barely perceptible bridges of intonation and meaning. Equally on his side were love and tenderness for his native city, which can be felt in the very vibrations of the piano strings. For the love of Kharkiv’s people truly belongs to the city, and the city itself truly stands upon that love. And the album Music of Kharkiv demonstrates all of this without the need for words.
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