In September 2025, an online presentation introduced Berezovsky: A Musical Anthology of Works, a project implemented by the Leopolis Academy of Early Music and Open Opera Ukraine and supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. The project aims to offer a comprehensive overview of Berezovsky’s works through a release of an album that spans the full range of genres in which he composed. Ukrainian musicians specializing in early music, as well as guest Austrian conductor Jörg Zwicker, an expert in performing early music, have created a genre-based audio panorama of Berezovsky’s works, based on historically informed performance. The release is now available on Spotify and YouTube Music.
Maksym Berezovsky is one of the leading composers in the Ukrainian musical tradition, perhaps the first Ukrainian artist of European stature. However, the process of discovering, publishing, and performing the lion’s share of his works has taken place over the last 30-40 years — the final period of the Soviet Union’s existence and Ukraine’s subsequent independence. Obviously, the official reason for ignoring Berezovsky’s music during the Soviet era was the sacred content of his choral works (despite occasional attempts to substitute religious texts with more “neutral” themes, such as nature), which still constitute the most popular part of the composer’s legacy. Yet, as we learn, even in school history classes, there is a difference between a pretext and a true cause.
On distorted imperial narratives
In March 1993, the Vidrodzhennia choir performed under the baton of Ukrainian conductor Mstyslav Yurchenko, in a concert symbolically entitled Vidrodzhennia Choir: The Forgotten Name of Maksym Berezovsky. But was Berezovsky’s name truly forgotten?
Rather, his legacy became a matter of cultural policy. If not forgotten, then certainly appropriated — by Russian propaganda. The reasons are clear: during Berezovsky’s lifetime Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, and the composer himself pursued his career in the imperial capital, St. Petersburg.
It was common practice for the Russian empire to claim the accomplishments of its colonies. Hence, Maksym Berezovsky, one of the earliestUkrainian professional composers of European stature, was gradually rebranded as a figure of “great Russian culture,” while his Ukrainian heritage was deliberately omitted.
For example, in 1972, the Moscow ensemble Barocco recorded the album Russian Music of the 18th Century, featuring works by the Russian Yevstignei Fomin alongside Dmytro Bortniansky and Maksym Berezovsky, both Ukrainians.
Discogs, one of the largest databases of music performers, productions, and labels, hostsseveral pages dedicated to Berezovsky. Alongside the Ukrainian entry, there is also a Russian version, where the composer’s biography begins: “Maksym Sozontovych Berezovsky is a Russian composer who also worked in Italy.” The creators of this webpage copied this description from the Russian-language Wikipedia, which is supported by other Russian internet sources.
A further example of how Berezovsky’s “Russianness” is promoted internationally can be seen in the 2018 performance by Moscow’s Pratum Integrum ensemble in the city of Gdańsk, at the prestigious Goldberg Festival. According to the official website of Gdańsk, “Pratum Integrum from Russia — an orchestra of early music instruments, founded in 2003 by Pavel Serbin, will present Russian music from the second half of the 18th century.” The program featured works by Anton Ferdinand Titz, Franz Kerzl (or, as he was called in Russia, ‘Kerzelli’), Dmytro Bortniansky, and Maksym Berezovsky.
It is noteworthy that the only publicly available video from this concert is the performance of Maksym Berezovsky’s Symphony in C major. The description of the video on YouTube reinforces this main narrative: “born in Hlukhiv [without acknowledging that Hlukhiv is a Ukrainian city — O.Ch.],” and describes the piece as “the first work written by a Russian author labeled with the word ‘symphony.’”
However, there is historical evidence that Berezovsky was recognized as Ukrainian during his own lifetime.
This is emphasized by Olha Shumilina, a researcher of the composer’s works(and a scholarly advisor to Open Opera Ukraine and the Leopolis Academy of Early Music). According to Olha Shumilina:
“The Ukrainian origin of M. Berezovsky is provided by Jakob von Stählin, the author of the German-language Notes on Music in Russia [Izvestiya o muzyke v Rossii], published in 1769. He refers to Berezovsky as one of the Ukrainian composers (”UkrainischenKomponisten“) [emphasis mine — O.Ch.].”
On the importance of Berezovsky’s choral music
“A composer who showed the path for Ukrainian music,” said Mstyslav Yurchenko about Maksym Berezovsky in the preface to the 1993 concert with the Vidrodzhennia choir mentioned above. Yurchenko, a conductor and scholar of Ukrainian sacred heritage, founded the Ukrainian Foundation for Sacred Music. He also initiated a recording of Berezovsky’s choral works (discovered in the 1980s).
The Vidrodzhennia choir, since 1993, has been recording the composer’s music for a radio archive, releasing CDs, and publishing recordings on its website. The most recent release, initiated by Yurchenko, is an anthology entitled Maksym Berezovsky: Rediscovered Choral Concertos. The disc, featuring nine choral concertos, was recorded in 2018 by the Patriarchal Choir of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Foundation for Sacred Music Choir.
The Kyiv Chamber Choir, under the direction of Mykola Hobdych, is also actively promoting the music of Maksym Berezovsky. Unlike the monographic albums of the Vidrodzhenniachoir, the Kyiv ensemble presents Berezovsky’s compositions alongside works by his contemporaries and predecessors. An example is the 1996 album Masterpieces of Ukrainian Choral Baroque, which includes works by Berezovsky, Bortnyansky, Vedel, and Dyletsky (though associating the first three composers with the Baroque style is debatable – particularlygiven a significant aesthetic distance between their music and that of Dyletsky). Nevertheless, the release of this album nearly 30 years ago was significant in placing Berezovsky’s musicin the context of other composers of his era, and the Kyiv Chamber Choir continues to championhis music today.
In 2024, Berezovsky’s choral works were revitalized through a joint project between Open Opera Ukraine and the Leopolis Academy of Early Music. The vocal ensembles A Cappella Leopolis and Partes, both specializing in early music, recorded a collaborative album, Vnemlite, Lyudiye by Rachynsky/Berezovsky, featuring three choral concertos by Berezovsky and his lesser-known contemporary, Rachynsky. Both ensembles are committed to historically informed performance practice and to focusing on the context of composers’ eras.
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Berezovsky’s music is now heard not only in Ukraine or online, but also on international stages. For example, in February 2025 the composer’s works were performed at the Berlin Cathedral as part of the Ukrainian and German Bach/Berezovsky project. The neo-Gothic setting of the cathedral served as the backdrop for a concert featuring compositions of Berezovsky and his European contemporaries, Baldassare Galuppi and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The Ukrainian vocal ensembles Alter Ratio and kammertón, both conducted by Olha Prykhodko, performed Berezovsky’s motets and concertos, while the German ensemble lautten compagney BERLIN presented orchestral works by his European contemporaries.
The unexplored: the case of Signor Beresciollo’s symphonies
The life and musical legacy of Maksym Berezovsky are still not fully understood. For many years, his life story was obscured by persistent myths, some of which continue to circulate despite the efforts of scholars to correct the record.
The same uncertainty applies to Berezovsky’s music. While some of his works have been lost, others have been misattributed to Berezovsky and remain the subject of debate. This refers to the case of the “two unknown symphonies,” whose scores were discovered in Paris by Kirill Karabits. These works premiered in 2020 under Karabits’s direction at St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv.
As a result, Berezovsky was known to have three symphonies, his Symphony in C major, an additional one in G major (No. 2), and another in C major (No. 3). These three symphonies, first performed and recorded by the Kyiv Soloists Orchestra, were subsequently performed by the Luhansk Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Ostapovych in Lviv. In 2023, the tradition of performing Maksym Berezovsky’s “three symphonies” continued in Chernihiv, as part of an Academy of Ukrainian Music project.
However, in 2021, Berezovsky scholar Olha Shumilina publicly challenged Karabits’ ssensational claim that the unknown symphonies were composed by Berezovsky, stating: “Everything happened without a public scholarly discussion of the question of authorship, which was necessary. The source of the musical scores of both sensationally presented works were two symphonies by Signor Beresciollo, published in Paris in 1760. Maksym Berezovsky was 15 years old at the time of the publication of the symphonies.”
This questionable “discovery” also exposed, among other things, a significant issue withinthe Ukrainian music community — the lack of meaningful dialogue between performers and scholars. As a result, there was a false sensation,caused by attributing two additional symphonies to Berezovsky.
Berezovsky on the world stage
Berezovsky’s Symphony in C major remainsone of his most frequently performed works, performed numerous times by Ukrainian orchestras in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and the British Parliament in London. Foreign ensembles also include the symphony in their repertoire. Publicly available recordings include performances by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Julian Rachlin, and the University of Nevada Orchestra in Las Vegas, conducted by Taras Krysa.
The symphony also premiered in Cyprus, in May 2023. However, it is alarming that the event’s Facebook page made no mention of Maksym Berezovsky’s Ukrainian nationality.
Performances of Berezovsky’s works internationally can be divided into twocategories. The first promotes the composer’s works by musicians from the country that claims them as its own. It is gratifying to seethat, after a long period of Russian cultural dominance, Ukrainian orchestras are increasingly presenting Berezovsky’s music to international audiences, emphasizing that the composer is part of Ukrainian culture.
This includes the previously mentioned performances by Ukrainian musicians in Berlin (the only event for which high-quality recordings are available) and London. Berezovsky’s works, particularly, the Symphony in C major and the orchestral version of the choral piece Our Father, were also featured in the Ukrainian National Symphony Orchestra’s performance at the 2025 ArtenetrA Summer Festival in France.These events took place after 2022, underscoring how the full-scale war has intensified the need to reclaim Ukrainian cultural heritage, particularly works that that had been appropriated by Russia for centuries.
The second category includes performances of Berezovsky’s music by foreign musicians. The only truly high-quality recording comes from the Warsaw Philharmonic. Notably, the concert took place in January 2022, before the full-scale invasion. Therefore, it cannot be interpreted merely as a gesture of solidarity with a neighboring country suffering from war. The only nuance remains in the somewhat unclear rationale behind the program’s music selection. How did the concert organizers decide to pairGlazunov’s music with the works of contemporaries and practically “classmates” — Mozart and Berezovsky? However, the concert booklet includes a particularly meaningful sentence: “Little is known about his life: even his date of birth is unknown, although it is generally accepted that the artist was born in 1745 in the Ukrainian [my emphasis — O.Ch.] town of Hlukhiv.”
Another notable example is the release in 2020 of Canadian singer Karina Gauvin’s album White Nights: Opera Arias of the Russian Court of the 18th Century. It features arias from operas by Domenico dall’Oglio, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Evstignei Fomin and two Ukrainians, Maksym Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky. The album’s annotation reflects naïve views on cultural history: “The court [Russian — O.Ch.] also financed the musical education of gifted young people. Ukraine was famous for its musical traditions, in particular the singing school in Hlukhiv, where Maksym Berezovsky (1745–1777) and Dmytro Bortniansky (1751–1825) gained their first knowledge.” This serves as another example of Berezovsky’s music being performed by foreign artists within a context that emphasizes admiration for old-world Russian culture.
Berezovsky’s instrumental and operatic heritage: small in numbers but no less important
The only known chamber instrumental work by Maksym Berezovsky is his Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord, which exists in two versions, one for violin and harpsichord and another for flute and harpsichord. Until recently, only two recordings of this work were available online. One was performed by violinist Yaromyr Babsky and pianist Yaromyr Bozenko. The second, a flute adaptation of the sonata’s second and third movements, was performed by Anton Kushnir and Maria Pukhlyanko. Both recordings use modern instruments.
Berezovsky’s opera Demofonte has been considerably less fortunate in terms of preservation. Most of its musical material has been lost, with only four arias and the overture(now known as the Symphony in C major)surviving. The arias are typically performed in concert settings, such as a 2021 performance at the National Philharmonic of Ukraine.
The latest chapter: Berezovsky’s “sound anthology”
On September 18, 2025, the Leopolis Academy of Early Music and Open Opera Ukraine presented the new album mentioned above: Berezovsky: A Musical Anthology of Works. It is a natural continuation of their collaboration from the previous year.
The album includes six choral concertos performed by the Partes ensemble, as well as two versions of Berezovsky’s Sonata — one for violin, cello, and harpsichord (performed by Serhii Havryliuk, Tetiana Hrechanivska, and Nataliia Fomenko), and another adapted for the harpsichord and the Ukrainian chromatic sopilka (performed by Bozhena Korchynska and Olha Shadrina-Lychak).
The release also advances Open Opera Ukraine’s long-term work on Berezovsky’s opera Demofonte, a project they have been developing since 2020. In the summer of 2025, the Liatoshynskyi Capella orchestra and soloists, conducted by Jörg Zwicker, recorded the overture and all four surviving arias from Demofonte.
In 2024, the Open Opera Ukraine team presented their work on Berezovsky’s opera at the Kyiv Baroque Fest. The idea to reconstruct and complete the opera, based on Pietro Metastasio’s original libretto, first emerged in 2020. With support of the Per Forma grant program, a complete version of the Demofontescore was created in 2024. A full-scale production of the opera is planned following professional recordings of existing parts.
By performing these pieces in the style of Berezovsky’s era and removing editorial revisions, the musicians offer a deeper understanding of Berezovsky’s artistic identity and the cultural environment in which he lived.
Over the past 30-40 years, Maksym Berezovsky’s music has come a long way in terms of performance interpretation. Finally, we are moving beyond the initial excitement of reclaiming this music as “ours” and toward more meaningful questions: How should this music be performed? How should it be listened to? How should it be discussed?
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