Performing National Identity: Interpreting the Folkloric Idiom of Lyatoshynsky’s Piano Preludes as Curated Musical Experience

Abstract

The piano preludes of Borys Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968)—the Three Preludes, Op. 38, the Two Preludes Based on the Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Songs, Op. 38bis, and the Five Preludes, Op. 44, all composed during the 1942–43 wartime evacuation—have re-entered Western concert life as vehicles of Ukrainian identity. This article asks how performing and curating the preludes afford an experience of Ukrainian identity for the present-day listener, extending the Ukrainian analytical literature on the cycles outward into curation and Western wartime reception. Drawing on recent documented cases—Vadym Kholodenko’s recital programming of Op. 38 alongside the canonical European repertory, and Margaret Fingerhut’s curated album Ukraine: A Piano Portrait—it argues that performance and curation operate not as distinct operations but as interacting practices: different degrees and forms of mediation through which the preludes’ folkloric idiom is configured as Ukrainian for the listener they address. The preludes’ internal difference between literal folk-song quotation (Op. 38bis) and folk intonation (Opp. 38 and 44) becomes a resource that performers and curators mobilise. Situating these cases within three documented strands of Lyatoshynsky’s re-reception during the Russo-Ukrainian war—orchestral, pianistic, and scholarly—the article reframes the wartime prelude as a site where national identity is configured for present-day listeners through layered acts of mediation.

1. Introduction

The current Western re-reception of Borys Lyatoshynsky is happening not only in the study but in the concert hall and on record. Across a single recent season, his Three Preludes, Op. 38, appeared on international recitals between Beethoven and Liszt (Duchen 2025); a British pianist built an entire album around Ukrainian piano music with his preludes at its centre (Buja 2025; SOMM Recordings 2025); and his Third Symphony returned to a major London stage in a programme that deliberately interleaved Russian and Ukrainian works (Clarke 2025). These are not, in the first instance, analytical events; they are experiences offered to listeners, in which Ukrainian identity is put forward to be heard, framed, and felt.

This article takes that observation as its point of departure. Its question—how performing and curating the preludes afford an experience of Ukrainian identity for the present-day listener those acts address—continues the Ukrainian analytical literature rather than correcting it. Oliinyk has read the Five Preludes, Op. 44, as an image-thematic wartime programme (Oliinyk 2012), and Hmyrin has carried the same cycle to the keyboard under the explicit rubric of its performance aspect (vykonavs’kyi aspekt) (Hmyrin 2024); both already treat the preludes’ national meaning as something to be projected, not merely parsed. What that literature has not yet followed is the works’ present Western circulation—the recital programme, the curated album, and the wartime reception within which the preludes are now encountered. Extending the analysis into that circulation is the contribution attempted here, and it matters for this Special Issue: the experience of musical performance is co-produced by repertoire choices, programming, interpretive decisions, and the contextual and visual framing that surrounds the sounding music. National identity, on this account, is enacted in acts of performance and curation, not simply inscribed in the work. This way of framing the question draws on two established bodies of theory. Christopher Small’s concept of musicking—that musical meaning is made not in an autonomous work but in the act of performing and listening—licenses treating a recital or a recording, rather than the score alone, as the site where identity is realised (Small 1998). Reception aesthetics supplies the complementary half: a performance addresses an implied listener and engages a horizon of expectations, so that what is at stake is the experience the work configures for that listener rather than a measured response from an empirical audience (Iser 1978; Jauss 1982). On this account, “national identity” is itself treated as something made and remade in such acts—constructed and enacted rather than an essence the music simply expresses. Read through these frames, a claim about mediated identity becomes tractable: it is a claim about what performers, curators, editors, and the addressed listener do with what the score affords. Such a claim is not self-confirming—a performance or a programme can also withhold or blur the identity it might enact, as the orchestral pairing discussed below does—and the frame earns its keep only where it discriminates between framings that configure a Ukrainian listening and framings that do not. The score is not thereby dissolved: it remains the enabling condition—the modal idiom, the withheld and granted thirds, the martial tritones are really there—but what turns those compositional facts into an experience of national belonging is the work performers and curators do with them, for the listener the performance addresses rather than an audience whose response is measured. How, then, do performance and curation stand to one another? Not, this article argues, as distinct operations—one realising an identity the score encodes, the other adding meaning the notes do not fix—but as interacting practices: different degrees and forms of mediation through which the same folkloric material is configured as Ukrainian for a listener. A recital is already curated—through repertoire placement, printed poetic epigraphs, venue, visual semiotics, and the critical discourse that surrounds it—and an album depends as much on pianistic interpretation as on sequencing and liner paratext. What distinguishes the Kholodenko and Fingerhut cases examined below is therefore not kind but configuration: which layers of mediation are foregrounded, how densely they are stacked, and how far each layer reaches toward the listener the performance or the record addresses. The claim tested here is that the preludes’ Ukrainian identity becomes an experience through this stacking of mediations—and that it can also be withheld or blurred, as the orchestral limiting case discussed below shows.

The argument proceeds in five steps. It first situates Lyatoshynsky’s preludes within the political charge of Ukrainian identity under Soviet rule, then fixes precisely which works are at stake—correcting a persistent catalogue confusion. It then examines two documented present-day cases in which the layers of mediation are differently configured: Vadym Kholodenko’s recitals, where curation operates inside performance, and Margaret Fingerhut’s album, where interpretation operates inside curation. Finally, it situates these within a deliberately selective reception ecology—three documented strands of Lyatoshynsky’s reception during the Russo-Ukrainian war: orchestral performance, pianistic performance and curation, and scholarship—before drawing the threads together.

2. Lyatoshynsky and the Problem of Ukrainian Identity Under Soviet Rule

Borys Mykolayovych Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) (Parkhomenko 2017) is widely regarded as one of the initiators and central representatives of the modern school in twentieth-century Ukrainian music (Wytwycky 2012). A law graduate of Kyiv University who completed his musical training at the Kyiv Conservatory under Reinhold Glière, he moved from an early idiom indebted to Scriabin toward a synthesis of contemporary European technique with Ukrainian folk material (Baley 2001); the Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes (1926) is usually taken to mark this turn toward a folk-based national idiom (Wytwycky 2012).

The institutional contours of this trajectory sharpen when read against the korenizatsiia (“indigenisation”) cultural policy, which ran from the early 1920s until its reversal under Stalin in the early-to-mid 1930s and under which a self-consciously Ukrainian art music sought footing within the new Soviet order. His early national turn belongs to those indigenisation years: he taught at the Kyiv Conservatory from 1920 and headed the Kyiv Association of Contemporary Music (Asotsiatsiia suchasnoi muzyky), which operated within the Leontovych Music Society, a platform aligned with the decade’s openness to a modern, nationally inflected idiom (Baley 2001; Riznyk 2001; Wytwycky 2012). His 1935 professorship of composition at Kyiv—held in parallel with a Moscow Conservatory chair across two periods (1935–38 and 1941–44)—and the troubles that soon followed fall, by contrast, within the subsequent Stalinist reversal of that policy rather than within indigenisation itself (Wytwycky 2012). This pedagogical position proved consequential beyond his own output: he shaped the next generation, and his teaching belongs to the lineage from which the so-called Kyiv Avant-Garde later emerged, Valentyn Silvestrov having studied composition with him at the Conservatory (Batstone 2022).

That national orientation carried real political risk, and the record of it is a fifteen-year sequence rather than a single event. The Symphony No. 2 (1935–36) had its scheduled Moscow premiere in February 1937 cancelled—officially because the concert fell in the mourning period for Sergo Ordzhonikidze, against a backdrop of gathering formalism accusations; revised in 1940, it was first performed in Kyiv in April 1941 and again in 1947, before the 1948 anti-formalism (Zhdanov) campaign condemned it as “anti-people” and “formalist,” the republican press deeming it “especially alien to the artistic tastes of the Soviet people”; it then went unheard until 1964 (Batstone 2022; Savchuk 2020; Wytwycky 2012). The Symphony No. 3, premiered in Kyiv in October 1951 under Natan Rakhlin with the motto “Peace will conquer war,” was condemned in the surrounding Union hearings and its finale forcibly revised; the revised version was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky in 1955, the motto silently dropped (Batstone 2022; Fareniuk 2024; Wytwycky 2012). Even the motto’s placement is unstable in the sources—it is variously attached to the whole symphony and, on the evidence of Theodore Kuchar’s Naxos notes as reported by Billinge, to the original finale alone (Billinge 2019)—an instability worth registering, because it means that for this composer even the seemingly fixed verbal paratexts of the works arrive already mediated, a point to which the discussion of the prelude epigraphs below returns. The encyclopaedic judgement that Lyatoshynsky “did not compromise and never adhered to a style of socialist realism” (Wytwycky 2012) should therefore be held against a more complicated record. The Taras Shevchenko suite derives from a film score for which Lyatoshynsky received a Stalin Prize in 1952; harder still are the patriotic opera Shchors (1937–38, to a libretto by Ivan Kocherha and Maksym Rylsky) and the lost Solemn Cantata (Urochysta kantata, 1939, text by Rylsky), works that sit squarely inside the official culture of their moment (Parkhomenko 2017; Wytwycky 2012). The broad arc of a Ukrainian modernist working under, and against, the pressure of Soviet cultural policy is well attested, but “never adhered” overstates it; what the record shows is negotiated survival. Recent musicology has read this history through the lens of decolonisation, reassessing how Soviet frames shaped the reception of Ukrainian composers (Sharikadze et al. 2024); the Stalin-era prize-and-punishment system that Lyatoshynsky negotiated has likewise been documented in detail (Frolova-Walker 2016).

3. The Three Prelude Cycles: What Is Actually Performed

Before asking how the preludes perform identity, it is necessary to say precisely which works are meant, because the catalogue is routinely muddled. Lyatoshynsky composed exactly three sets of piano preludes, all during his 1942–43 wartime evacuation to Saratov: the Three Preludes, Op. 38 (1942); the Two Preludes Based on the Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Songs, Op. 38bis (1942); and the Five Preludes, Op. 44 (1943, first published 1947) (IMSLP 2026a, 2026b, 2026c; Wytwycky 2012). A common error assigns a fourth “Op. 45” set of preludes; in fact, Op. 45 is the Suite on Ukrainian National Themes for string quartet, not a piano work (IMSLP 2026d).

The three cycles are not uniform in how they engage folk material, and this internal difference is analytically load-bearing for what follows. The contrast is best framed as one of degree and audibility rather than as an absolute divide: Op. 38bis takes its very title from Ukrainian folk songs and sets borrowed tunes overtly, whereas in Op. 38 and the Op. 44 set the folk element is largely submerged into idiom—modal inflection, drone textures, parallel motion—rather than surfacing as quotation (Wytwycky 2012; IMSLP 2026b, 2026c). That this is a matter of degree, and not a clean quotation/non-quotation binary, matters: the catalogue history of these closely related wartime sets is itself unsettled, and the relationship between Op. 38 and Op. 38bis remains in part an open question, taken up below. The cycles circulate under evocative paratexts—Op. 38, for instance, has circulated informally under the title “Shevchenko Suite” (Shevchenkivs’ka siuita), as in recent filmed performances from Kyiv and Khmelnytsky (Hepliuk 2022; Lyakhovich 2022)—and the most consequential of these paratexts stands in the score itself. In the most widely circulated edition of the piano works (the posthumous anthology Moscow: Muzyka, 1972, edited by Igor Belza), each of the Three Preludes of Op. 38 is headed, above its first system, by a bilingual Ukrainian–Russian epigraph from Taras Shevchenko, signed with the poet’s name (Lyatoshynsky 1972). Whether the epigraphs are authorial or editorial cannot be settled from that print: the edition appeared four years after the composer’s death, under an editor who was also his advocate and biographer, and it carries no apparatus assigning the epigraphs to either hand; the work is catalogued under the plain title Three Preludes (IMSLP 2026b), and the autograph has not been examined for this study. One contemporary critic reports the quotations as the composer’s own (Downey 2026), but reportage is evidence, not settlement. The question, though open, is instructive either way—and it bears directly on this article’s thesis. If the epigraphs are authorial, they show the composer acting as his own first curator, framing the cycle’s listening before any performer touches it; if editorial, they are a posthumous curatorial intervention already operating inside the text. On either branch, the earliest layer of the mediation this article traces sits within the score’s own covers, and the boundary between what a score fixes and what curation adds proves porous at the source. Notably, the companion cycle Op. 38bis carries no epigraphs at all in the same edition (Lyatoshynsky 1972): the framing is specific to Op. 38, not a house habit of the volume.

Each of the Three Preludes, Op. 38, is thus headed, in the edition in general circulation, by lines of Taras Shevchenko, so that the cycle reaches the player already in the company of poetry: an exile’s backward glance toward Ukraine, a landscape of black graves, and a vision of a renewed earth without enemies. Whether the poems were composed into the music’s material or joined to it posthumously cannot be settled here; on either branch, the printed epigraphs invite whoever opens this edition to associate the musical material with Shevchenko’s images—an invitation the readings below suggest the material is well placed to sustain. The harmonic and cadential readings that follow—here and in the discussion of Op. 38bis below—are my own analysis of the published score (the Muzyka edition); pitch-spellings are offered as interpretive identifications rather than as settled fact. The first prelude (Andante sostenuto) opens not with a triad but with a descending chain of parallel open fourths and fifths—a quartal-quintal planing tinged by a lowered second and fifth—the prelude’s B-flat minor inflected toward the modal rather than the functional, its defining minor third pointedly withheld. Here, the national signifier is audibly idiom—drone fifths, modal scales without a leading tone, parallel motion—foregrounded over any literal borrowed tune.

Across the set, this idiom carries an affective argument that the performer inherits intact. The first prelude withholds resolution, closing on a bare B-flat–F fifth with no third; the second (Lento tenebroso) sinks both hands into the bass register for the darkest writing in the cycle—irregular metre, deep chromatic chords over a low pedal—before admitting a single consoling major third, a Picardy E-flat, at its close; the third (Moderato con moto) sets a narrow, leading-tone-free melody over an almost unbroken drone ostinato and builds, by way of the submediant D major, to a fortissimo F-sharp-major apotheosis—redemption granted, though a persistent flattened sixth (D-natural) keeps a minor-mode shadow audible. The drama of the cycle can be read in one interval: the third withheld at the end of the first prelude, granted at the end of the second, and granted-but-clouded at the end of the third. This trajectory of longing, mourning, and qualified renewal is the same transformed return—hope shadowed by a question—that the analytical literature identifies in the image-thematic design of the Five Preludes, Op. 44 (Hmyrin 2024; Oliinyk 2012); in Op. 38, it is what a pianist programming the set is given to make audible.

A caveat about these markers is required, and conceding it strengthens rather than weakens the argument. Modal inflection, drone fifths, parallel motion, tritones, and withheld thirds are not intrinsically Ukrainian: the same materials circulate widely across European modernism, the folklorisms of many nations, and the general musical rhetoric of archaism. What secures their Ukrainian specificity here is not the sonorities themselves but a documented chain of mediation. Lyatoshynsky’s own practice quotes Ukrainian folk songs outright in the companion cycle Op. 38bis—whose very title declares its melodies borrowed, even though the located sources identify no individual song—and his music has drawn on Ukrainian folk material since the Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes (1926) (Wytwycky 2012). The Ukrainian analytical tradition reads his idiom through the national-intonational lens—the folk-intonation (intonatsiia) tradition of Ukrainian musicology and its account of a national musical language (Kozarenko 2000; Martsenkivska 2019). And recent performance scholarship hears precisely this folk-modal logic, without direct quotation, in Opp. 38 and 44 (Savelyeva 2025). The claim is therefore not circular, though it is worth stating the circle it must avoid: it would be circular to argue that current programming frames the music as Ukrainian, that listeners consequently hear its features as Ukrainian, and that those features then prove an identity already in the score. The historical evidence runs the other way. The folk quotation of Op. 38bis, the documented national idiom of the 1920s, and the Soviet campaigns that condemned the leading works of that idiom as “formalist” and “anti-people” (Section 2) all antedate the present war and its programming by eight decades. What the recent cases show is not that the music “is” Ukrainian because it is now heard that way, but that framings differ in what they do with an independently documented national idiom—and, as the counter-framings in Section 6 show, other framings can blur that idiom’s national address or refract it through a Russian lens, while the search reported there found no recording of the preludes whose complete paratext configures no Ukrainian listening at all.

If the Op. 38 trajectory has to be read out of the score, the Five Preludes, Op. 44, arrive in the Ukrainian literature already supplied with a narrative reading, and it is worth setting that published account beside the present one rather than re-deriving it. Oliinyk reads the cycle as “a musical chronicle of humanity’s great tragedy”—a wartime programme in five panels (Oliinyk 2012). On this image-thematic account, the first prelude voices suddenness, oppression, and despair—its opening likened to “a sudden sharp pain from a treacherous shot in the back,” its first phrase the “hopeless grief of one person” whose recurrence comes to “unite the whole people”; the second turns to warmth and love of family and Homeland in a melody close to Ukrainian folk song; the third gives an “image of the fascist invasion” and the struggle against it; the fourth a rebirth, a “resurrection from the ashes”; and the fifth a “majestic life-affirming finale” whose closing chordal fanfares form an “apotheosis of victory” (Oliinyk 2012). Hmyrin’s performance analysis sets the same five panels at the keyboard (Hmyrin 2024). He follows the cycle from a Lugubre ma non troppo lento in E-flat minor over an ostinato octave bass, through a Lento e tranquillo folk-song-like cantabile in B minor, an Allegro agitato toccata carrying a lyrical theme in G minor, and an Andante sostenuto in G-sharp minor built on a descending ostinato and a minor-second “mourning” motif, to an Impetuoso major-mode fanfare finale. That finale, on Hmyrin’s reading, works as a cyclic “kaleidoscope” that recapitulates each prelude’s theme and brings back the first prelude’s idea “in a more hopeful character” while still leaving “a question mark” (Hmyrin 2024). This is the same withheld-then-granted logic the present reading hears across Op. 38: renewal is offered but not made unconditional, and what the published analyses describe as image-thematic design is, in performance, exactly the manner a pianist is given to project.

4. Performing Identity Without Words: The Kholodenko Case

The Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko has made the Three Preludes, Op. 38, a recurring feature of major international recitals, and the way he frames them illustrates how identity is performed rather than merely played. At Wigmore Hall (9 December 2025), he placed the set between Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata and Liszt’s Paganini Études (Duchen 2025). The programming itself does curatorial work: positioning a little-known Ukrainian cycle within the canonical European repertory stakes a claim for its seriousness and invites the audience to hear it on the same plane as the masterworks around it. A recital, that is, is never bare performance: placement, the poetic epigraphs relayed to the audience by the printed programme, the platform itself, and the visual field around the pianist are curation operating inside the concert hall—a form whose conventions and programming logic have their own constructed history (Hamilton 2008; Weber 2008).

The critical reception registers the resulting experience in vivid terms. Reviewing the Wigmore recital, Jessica Duchen described the preludes as “icily cruel soundscapes, headed by quoted poetry but suggesting something more personal, sometimes horrifying,” singling out the second as a “graveyard scene” (Duchen 2025). Five months later, reviewing Kholodenko’s Washington Performing Arts recital of 5 May 2026—evidence that this framing has travelled across the season and across continents—the critic Charles T. Downey observed that Kholodenko “did not need to say a word about the brutal Russian war in Ukraine: this poetic subtext, along with the Ukrainian flag pin worn on his lapel, spoke even more forcefully” (Downey 2026). The flag pin is a small but telling datum: it shows identity being communicated through visual and contextual semiotics that surround the sounding notes, conditioning the hearing an audience is invited into. These are, of course, individual critics’ readings; but the pairing of the preludes with Shevchenko’s lines is not the reviewers’ invention—the widely circulated Muzyka edition prints a bilingual Shevchenko epigraph above each of the three preludes (Lyatoshynsky 1972), so performers meet the poetry in the score itself (only the epigraphs’ authorial or editorial provenance remains open, as Section 3 discussed), and the Wigmore programme note carried that layer onward to the audience, explaining that each prelude “is prefaced by a short quotation taken from the work of the Ukrainian romantic poet, Taras Shevchenko” (Wigmore Hall 2025). The chain of mediation is thereby documented end to end: from edition, through programme booklet, to the critics’ hearing. The reviews are most useful as evidence of how the performances were experienced.

Because Op. 38 carries identity as manner rather than quotation, what a listener is invited to hear as “Ukrainian” is not a recognisable tune but a set of sonorities the pianist chooses to project: the hollow ring of the opening fifths, the weight and pacing of the tenebroso bass, the evenness of the third prelude’s drone. On this reading, Duchen’s account of “icily cruel soundscapes” and a second prelude heard as a “graveyard scene” is not free association but a hearing of what the score and its poetic frame supply—the black graves of the printed Shevchenko epigraph finding an audible image in the deep, metrically unmoored chromatic harmony (Duchen 2025). Downey’s observation that Kholodenko “did not need to say a word” because the poetic subtext and the flag pin “spoke even more forcefully” describes precisely how the modal idiom and the poetic and visual framing layered around it are configured, in the moment of performance, into a lived concert experience (Downey 2026).

These remain critics’ accounts and my own reading of the score. What I add now is different in kind, and is offered under an explicit methodological flag: autoethnography. Performance scholarship has long argued that what a performance does is knowable in the event rather than from the text alone (Abbate 2004), and musicology has developed a declared first-person mode in which the researcher’s own situated musical experience—playing, listening, attending—is admitted as evidence precisely because it is owned and reflexively positioned rather than smuggled in as neutral description (Bartleet and Ellis 2009; Le Guin 2006). In that mode, Kholodenko brought this programme to Prague’s Rudolfinum on 21 March 2026, again placing Op. 38 between Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” and Liszt’s Paganini Études (Bachtrack 2026), and I heard it live in the hall. The account is situated, not neutral: I came to the hall having read Duchen’s review of the Wigmore recital quoted above—one listener encountering the music inside the framing this article describes—which is precisely what makes the hearing evidence of a configured listening rather than a report from nowhere. In live performance, the interpretive choices traced above stopped being abstract possibilities and became audible events. The first prelude’s bare fifths were not struck and released but left to hang, unmeasured, so that the room kept waiting for a resolution that never came—the silence around them was part of the sound. The Lento tenebroso was paced so slowly that its chromatic bass registered as weight rather than motion, each chord voiced from the floor upward, so that what Duchen calls a “graveyard scene” became grief held still rather than mere density. The closing F-sharp major arrived clouded by its flattened sixth: not a triumph but a return that remembers, a brightness aware of what had preceded it. Heard from inside the idiom rather than as something exotic, the effect was recognitional rather than illustrative—the music did not depict an identity so much as let a listener inhabit one—an experience a recital can also hold open for a listener meeting Lyatoshynsky for the first time. The evidentiary claim of this account is bounded but real: it documents how the score’s terms, and the framing that travels with them, registered for one prepared, situated listener in one hall—an empirical hearing that can be set beside the implied listener that reception aesthetics describes (Iser 1978), without claiming to be that construct.

5. Curating Identity: The Recital and Album as Argument

If Kholodenko performs identity in the hall, the British pianist Margaret Fingerhut curates it on record. Her album Ukraine: A Piano Portrait (SOMM Recordings, SOMMCD 0701, released 18 April 2025) gathers Ukrainian piano music—including Lyatoshynsky’s Two Preludes Based on the Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Songs, Op. 38bis (1942), and his 1920 “Elegy-Prelude”—and directs its royalties to British-Ukrainian Aid (Buja 2025; SOMM Recordings 2025). The album is framed explicitly as an identity-claiming gesture, and the published framing makes the experiential argument legible on two levels. Fingerhut’s own stated rationale, quoted in Interlude’s feature on the album, is a criterion of affect and address: the works were chosen to show the country’s moods—“dark, sad, and tragic, of course, but also richly romantic, heroic, triumphant, joyous, and even humorous” (Buja 2025). Around her words, the feature’s writer supplies the reading the curation invites: that in the end, “Ukraine must claim her own”, and that the Op. 38bis preludes carry “nationalism that was Ukraine in full battle mode,” followed by the “Elegy-Prelude” as “the mourning that follows the fighting” (Buja 2025)—a critic’s gloss, not the curator’s own words, and precisely thereby already evidence of the configured listening the album affords. The framing is not the feature’s alone: the label’s own presentation casts the disc as a “timely” tribute to “a rich heritage of Ukrainian music that was long subsumed by the former USSR,” (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), performed by an artist drawn to “composers from the country of her grandfather’s birth” (SOMM Recordings 2025)—a decolonising, diasporic frame fixed in the published paratext independently of any single interview. The label copy is, of course, itself paratext rather than independent testimony: part of the curated object under analysis, not a witness to its effect. For witnesses, one must turn to the disc’s independent reception, taken up below.

Fingerhut’s phrase is borne out by the writing itself. Where the Three Preludes evoke a folk idiom without literal quotation, Op. 38bis does the opposite, taking its title from—and building on—actual Ukrainian folk songs; yet quotation does not soften the modernism. Both preludes set their borrowed tunes in hard parallel intervals over a reiterated drone or ground bass, sharpened by a prominent tritone, so that the songs turn percussive and martial rather than picturesque: the first (Allegro tumultuoso) hammers its tune in D minor above a tonic drone before opening it out, fortissimo, into a blazing D-major apotheosis; the second (Allegro risoluto) drives a resolute E-flat-major tune over a passacaglia-like descending bass. The martial charge the critic hears as “battle mode” is afforded by the notes—tritone, ostinato, parallel planing opening into triads—but the score supplies only the condition: what turns that latent violence into an audible claim of national belonging is the curatorial and critical framing that names it, sequences it against the elegy, and so offers it to be heard. The contrast the two cycles stage—literal song made martial here, folk manner made elegiac in Op. 38—is what the curated sequence, Op. 38bis set against the 1920 “Elegy-Prelude” and heard by an early critic as “the mourning that follows the fighting” (Buja 2025), offers the listener as an experience of Ukrainian identity.

The curatorial sequence is itself meaning-making. Placing the folk-song-based Op. 38bis—the cycle that sets its borrowed Ukrainian tunes overtly—against an elegiac companion stages a narrative of struggle and mourning offered to the listener as a single arc; the choice to foreground the quotation cycle rather than the idiom-based Opp. 38 or 44 is consonant with an album whose argument is about overt national belonging (cf. Section 3). The recording thus enacts identity through selection, ordering, paratext, and even its charitable destination.

The sequence argument extends beyond that single pairing to the architecture of the whole disc. Ukraine: A Piano Portrait spans works written between 1877 and 2005—Lysenko, Barvinsky, Revutsky, Kosenko, Bortkiewicz, Silvestrov, Lyatoshynsky—yet its running order is affective rather than chronological (SOMM Recordings 2025). It opens in the diaspora and the borderland, with Bortkiewicz’s Crimean Les Rochers d’Outche-Coche; moves through Barvinsky’s early preludes to Lysenko’s founding-generation Dumka-Shumka (Rhapsody on Ukrainian Themes No. 2) of 1877, then Revutsky’s preludes and Kosenko’s nocturne; reaches the near-present in Silvestrov’s Bagatelles of 2005; and only then, as its penultimate station, arrives at Lyatoshynsky—the two folk-song preludes of Op. 38bis followed at once by the 1920 “Elegy-Prelude” (Mourning)—before Bortkiewicz’s Consolation closes the frame. Within a hundred-and-thirty-year span deliberately shuffled out of historical order, the wartime folk-song preludes—the cycle whose very title declares its melodies borrowed, melodies made martial, then mourned—are placed as the disc’s emotional climax and given the last substantive word before consolation. They are not the programme’s first or only overt national gesture: Lysenko’s rhapsody on Ukrainian themes stands at the disc’s third station. The distinction the ordering enacts is therefore not between national material and its absence, but between generations and idioms—the founding generation’s rhapsody of 1877, the wartime modernist folk-song setting of 1942—and it is the latter that the sequence withholds until its climax. That placement is the strongest curatorial claim on the record: the whole recital is built to arrive at, and then recover from, Lyatoshynsky’s wartime nationalism.

What a recording changes is not the listener’s freedom, which it enlarges rather than removes: a listener at home may pause, repeat, skip, reorder, or shuffle the tracks at will—liberties no recital grants. The fixed running order therefore compels nothing; it proposes. What the sequence and its surrounding apparatus do is encode an intended progression—an itinerary the curation recommends without being able to enforce—and the implied listener (Iser 1978) is configured accordingly: not a captive of the sequence but the auditor the album projects, the one who takes up the offer and hears the programme as set down. What distinguishes the disc from the hall lies elsewhere. The framing work that, in live performance, falls to the venue, the spoken introduction, or a flag pinned to a lapel here devolves entirely onto the artefact—its title, its liner notes, its cover, and the published destination of its proceeds—so that paratext and sequence carry the whole burden of address: paratext operating, in Genette’s sense, as the threshold through which the work is entered (Genette 1997). Fingerhut’s stated criterion of selection, a preference for “sincerity and authenticity of feeling” (Buja 2025), is therefore not a private aesthetic note but the premise of a sustained argument: the disc is built to be received as one continuous claim rather than as a miscellany, each prelude vouched for by the same affective test and ordered to make that test legible across the programme. The dedication of royalties to British-Ukrainian Aid (SOMM Recordings 2025) completes the gesture by extending it past the sounding music: the paratext does not merely describe the record but commits it, so that the act of listening is folded into an act of material solidarity, and the boundary between hearing the music and supporting its cause is deliberately thinned. The album thus arrives as a single curated experience whose meaning is offered whole to the listener, the argument made not only in the notes but in everything arranged around them.

The album’s independent reception indicates that this curated address was taken up on its own terms by the listeners whose responses to the disc are documented—its reviewers and broadcasters. Gramophone’s reviewer heard exactly the curatorial art described here, opening on an “evocatively beautiful and intelligently curated recital” and closing on Fingerhut’s “exemplary pianism and programme-building” (Distler 2025). MusicWeb International’s reviewer singled out the Lyatoshynsky group in performative terms: “darker, angrier and more defiant than what we have heard previously on this record. Fingerhut digs deep in these troubled pages and I think produces her best performances” (Harrison 2025)—a reminder that what the sequence stages, the pianism must deliver, interpretation being the layer of mediation that operates inside the curation just as programming is the curatorial layer inside Kholodenko’s recitals. The disc was also recommended among WFMT Chicago’s weekly new releases (Ellis 2025). These are critical, performative, and institutional registers of the disc’s own reception; none of them measures an audience, but together they document that independent listeners—reviewers and a broadcaster—took up the album’s proposed listening in the terms its curation offers, and they did so independently of the label’s own paratext, which can accordingly be read as what it is: the object’s self-description rather than its confirmation. A fourth testimonial register belongs to the live project around the album rather than to the disc itself: Ukrainians in her recital audiences, Fingerhut reports, “come backstage to thank me for playing music from their homeland and they dissolve into tears as they struggle to explain what it means to them” (Fingerhut 2025). That first-person account documents concert reception of the same repertory, not reception of the recording; what it attests is the charge this music carries for listeners in the hall, not what the album achieved on record.

6. Reception Ecology: How the Identity Frame Is Encountered

These two cases sit inside a broader wave of Western re-reception that conditions how audiences read Lyatoshynsky’s identity even when the preludes are not on the programme. The London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski performed his Third Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in a programme that, as one review put it, “melded Russia and the Ukraine” (Clarke 2025)—a framing that places his music squarely within the contemporary question of Ukrainian cultural self-assertion. The orchestral and the pianistic strands reinforce one another: the symphonic reception supplies an interpretive horizon of expectations (Jauss 1982) within which a listener encountering the preludes is already positioned to hear national meaning.

This reinforcement is not confined to the concert hall. A third strand—scholarly rather than performative—now runs alongside the orchestral and pianistic ones, and it is arguably the most consequential, because it supplies the interpretive vocabulary through which Western institutions and audiences make sense of what they are hearing. Recent flagship musicology has begun to reframe the Soviet repertory in terms of colonisation and decolonisation, arguing for “throwing off the Russian lenses” through which Ukrainian music was long heard and catalogued (Sharikadze et al. 2024). A composer such as Lyatoshynsky, whose national affiliation was for decades read as a regional inflection of a Russian-centred Soviet mainstream, is precisely the kind of figure this current repositions. The same reframing recovers a longer history: Ukraine’s twentieth-century avant-garde is presented not as a footnote to Russian music but as a tradition in its own right, one within which a Lyatoshynsky symphony could be branded “formalist” and suppressed (Batstone 2022). When such a work returns to a major Western stage, the scholarly account of its earlier silencing is part of what makes its return legible as an act of cultural recovery rather than mere programming novelty.

These three strands—the orchestral reception, the pianistic performance and curation examined above in Kholodenko’s recitals and Fingerhut’s curated album, and the decolonising scholarship—thus form a single reception ecology rather than a set of isolated events, and each lends the others its authority. The claim is deliberately selective rather than synoptic: what is described here is not a survey of Western reception but three documented strands, singled out because they intersect the preludes’ present circulation; other strands, and counter-currents, surely exist. The decolonising scholarship gives critics and programmers a frame; the symphonic performance gives that frame a high-profile public occasion (Clarke 2025); the recital and album bring the same frame to bear on the preludes themselves, where, as argued throughout, identity is performed and curated rather than simply quoted. What binds the ecology together, and sharpens it, is the present war: the renewed Western attention to Lyatoshynsky coincides with the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which has made the question of whether his music is heard as Russian or as Ukrainian feel urgent rather than taxonomic. The same orchestral pairing of the two traditions no longer arrives as a neutral juxtaposition; such programming now invites reading against the decolonising argument that the two ought to be disentangled (Sharikadze et al. 2024), and against the recovered memory of suppression that gives that argument its moral weight (Batstone 2022). That pairing is in fact a limiting case for the present argument: a programme that melds rather than disentangles does not enact a cleanly Ukrainian identity but stages an unresolved one. It is, admittedly, an oblique case—an orchestral programme of the Third Symphony rather than the preludes themselves. For the works at issue, the natural test would be a direct negative case: a recording of the preludes whose complete paratext configures no Ukrainian listening at all—clean both in its peritext, the layers printed on the object itself (title, track list, sleeve, notes), and in its epitext, the layers that surround it (performer biography, catalogue copy, public billing), to use Genette’s division (Genette 1997). A search for one failed, and the failure should be stated openly, because it proves informative. The preludes’ recorded history is strikingly thin—a handful of items across the eight decades since their composition—and the search located no clean case: every examined item either carries the Ukrainian frame somewhere in its own paratext or approaches neutrality only by carrying almost no paratext at all. The nearest candidate is a recital disc released in 2016 that programmes the complete Five Preludes, Op. 44, under a resolutely internationalist title and track list—20th Century Piano, five composer surnames with dates and no nationalities, alongside Pigovat, Feinberg, Lourié, and Baines (Mebounou 2016). At the level of title and programme, the disc configures no Ukrainian listening; its complete paratext, however, does. The performer’s biography, printed in French and English on the album’s own back cover and repeated in the label’s catalogue, presents her as a specialist in Russian and Ukrainian music who made repeated study visits to Ukraine; a contemporary distributor’s catalogue went further, describing Op. 44 to buyers as “derived from Ukrainian folk music” (Records International 2016). The frame the title withholds, the performer-biography layer restores. A Soviet-era long-playing record that presents preludes from Op. 44 inside a composer-portrait record is not clean either: its catalogue record gives composer and pianist their Ukrainian name-forms (Rzhanov 1975). A 2024 self-released digital issue of the complete cycle comes closest of all: its peritext is clean, but only by near-silence—title, composer, and five track titles, with no booklet and no descriptive note (Paniyeva 2024)—while its epitext restores the frame, the performer being publicly billed as a Ukrainian pianist (Paniyeva n.d.; San Francisco Classical Voice n.d.). For the companion cycle Op. 38bis, finally, the question cannot arise, since the word “Ukrainian” stands in the work’s own title (Section 3). The one genuine counter-framing located runs in the opposite direction: as late as 1999, two of Lyatoshynsky’s romances could appear on a recital disc titled Russian Images (Savenko and Blok 1999)—exactly the “Russian lenses” the decolonising scholarship now names (Sharikadze et al. 2024). The same repertory framed otherwise affords a different experience; performance and curation are doing identity-work that is neither automatic nor reducible to the notes. A thesis able to point to framings it does not fit—the melded orchestral programme, the Russophone rubric—and willing to report that its search for a third, a paratext-clean recording of the preludes, came back empty is, to that extent, not self-confirming; and the absence of a clean counter-example is a finding in its own right, statable layer by layer: no located recording is free of the frame in its epitext, and the one recording whose peritext is free of it achieves that only by silence. For these works, the Ukrainian frame has proved nearly inescapable: across the whole of their thin recorded history, it adheres at one paratextual layer or another—not least since 2022—and where it is escaped at all, it is escaped by paratextual silence, not by counter-statement. That near-inescapability is itself part of the ecology this section describes. The identity frame, in other words, is no longer something a listener must be coaxed into; it arrives with the music, supplied jointly by performers, curators, scholars, and the historical moment. This is the ecology within which any account of how Lyatoshynsky now sounds—on stage and on record—must be situated.

7. Conclusions

Read together, these cases suggest that the Ukrainian identity of Lyatoshynsky’s piano preludes is not settled at any single layer: it is configured for the present-day listener through interacting degrees and forms of mediation. The folkloric idiom and the poetry printed with it, the interpretive choices of a performer, the legitimating logic of a recital programme, the semiotics of a flag pin, and the narrative shaping and sequencing of an album do not divide into one act that realises meaning and another that adds it; each is a layer of framing that conditions what the others can do, and all participate in affording, for the listener they address, an experience of national belonging that no single layer completes by itself. That the preludes were written in the displacement of 1942–43, and are now heard amid a new war, gives that experience a renewed and particular charge. Approaching the prelude as a site of experienced identity—rather than as a text whose national content is fixed once and for all—opens the wartime miniature to the kinds of questions this Special Issue poses about how musical experiences are made.

What this account claims, and what it does not, is worth stating plainly. Its evidence is interpretive and reception-critical—published reviews, curatorial paratext, and a single declared autoethnographic hearing—rather than evidence from an empirical study of how audiences in fact responded; its subject is the listener these performances and recordings address and configure, not measured reception. Within that limit, the contribution is specific: where the Ukrainian literature reads the preludes’ national meaning in the score’s image-thematic design (Oliinyk 2012) and at the keyboard (Hmyrin 2024), this article follows it outward into the programming, paratext, and Western wartime reception (its orchestral, pianistic, and scholarly strands) through which present-day listeners meet the works—and shows the framing is not automatic, since a programme can also withhold or blur the identity, as the “melded” orchestral pairing does. What the layers of mediation contribute is visible precisely where different framings of the same notes diverge: the wartime miniature becomes, in performance and curation, a site where national belonging is offered to be experienced rather than only read.