This album of piano quintets from Ukraine was made in December of 2020. It shot onto the best-seller charts in the spring of 2022 as listeners sought to support Ukrainian musicians, but in truth, the music was worth investigating before that, and it is to be hoped that these pieces will find places in the repertory. As with many works from Eastern Europe, these draw on various sources in distinctively national ways. The Ukrainian Quintet, Op. 42, of Boris Lyatoshynsky dates from 1942 (it was revised three years later). Part ...
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This album of piano quintets from Ukraine was made in December of 2020. It shot onto the best-seller charts in the spring of 2022 as listeners sought to support Ukrainian musicians, but in truth, the music was worth investigating before that, and it is to be hoped that these pieces will find places in the repertory. As with many works from Eastern Europe, these draw on various sources in distinctively national ways. The Ukrainian Quintet, Op. 42, of Boris Lyatoshynsky dates from 1942 (it was revised three years later). Part Scriabin and part Rachmaninov, it has a tension that doubtless originated in its wartime environment. The nocturne slow movement and the extremely spiky Allegro third movement are exceptional, and the work, although it is not Shostakovich, is not trying to be. The quintet by Valentin Silvestrov, dedicated to Lyatoshynsky, comes from the early '60s when the Soviets allowed a certain circumscribed modernism. Silvestrov is the only one of these three composers at all known in the West,...
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