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

1. Introduction

The current Western re-reception of Borys Lyatoshynsky is not happening in the study but in the concert hall and on record. Within a single recent season his Three Preludes, Op. 38, appeared on an international recital 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 “melded Russia and the Ukraine” (Clarke 2025). These are not, in the first instance, analytical events; they are experiences offered to listeners, in which Ukrainian identity is something heard, framed, and felt.

This article takes that observation as its point of departure. Rather than asking how national identity is encoded in the notes of Lyatoshynsky’s piano preludes—a text-immanent question that a score analysis would answer—it asks how performing and curating the preludes affords an experience of Ukrainian identity for the present-day listener those acts address. The distinction 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 the act 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 the encoded/enacted distinction becomes tractable: a claim about enacted identity is a claim about what performers, curators, and the addressed listener do with what the score encodes. 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. The contribution is therefore deliberately asymmetric, and the sharper for it. A performer such as Kholodenko largely realises what the score and its printed epigraphs already encode, making audible the identity that the image-thematic readings of the Ukrainian literature (Hmyrin 2024; Oliinyk 2012) locate in the work; the strong claim—that framing does not merely signal a settled identity but configures the experience of one, adding meaning the notes do not fix—is reserved for, and tested on, the curatorial case. Performance, on this account, is where an encoded identity is made audible; curation is where it is, in the fuller sense, enacted.

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: a performance case (Vadym Kholodenko’s recitals) and a curation case (Margaret Fingerhut’s album). Finally it situates these within the wider reception ecology of Lyatoshynsky during the Russo-Ukrainian war, before drawing the threads together.

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

Borys Mykolayovych Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) 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 led the Ukrainian Society of Contemporary Music (1922–1925), a platform aligned with the decade’s openness to a modern, nationally inflected idiom (the body’s exact designation varies between sources) (Baley 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. His Symphony No. 2 (1935–36) was branded “anti-national formalist,” an official statement deeming it “especially alien to the artistic tastes of the Soviet people”; after the 1948 anti-formalism (Zhdanov) campaign it was banned outright and not heard again until 1964. His Symphony No. 3 (1951), whose finale carried the epigraph “Peace shall defeat war,” was condemned and its finale forcibly revised, a revised version surfacing only in the mid-1950s (Batstone 2022; Wytwycky 2012). The encyclopaedic judgement that Lyatoshynsky “did not compromise and never adhered to a style of socialist realism” (Wytwycky 2012) should be held alongside the more complicated record—his Taras Shevchenko suite derives from a film score whose film won a Stalin Prize—but the broad arc of a Ukrainian modernist working under, and against, the pressure of Soviet cultural policy is well attested. 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 2026; Wytwycky 2012). A common error assigns a fourth “Op. 45” set of preludes; in fact Op. 45 is the Suite on Ukrainian Themes for string quartet, not a piano work (IMSLP 2026).

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 (IMSLP 2026; Wytwycky 2012). 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 are often circulated under evocative paratexts—Op. 38, for instance, frequently appears in concert listings and on recordings under the title “Shevchenko Suite,” with individual preludes attached to lines of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry.

Each of the Three Preludes, Op. 38 is headed in performance by a line of Taras Shevchenko, so that the cycle reaches the player already as a setting of poetry: an exile’s backward glance toward Ukraine, a landscape of black graves, and a vision of a renewed earth without enemies. The poems are not glosses laid over neutral music; they are composed into its material. 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.

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 interpretive 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.

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). In a Washington recital, 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, shaping how an audience hears them. These are, of course, individual critics’ readings; but the pairing of the preludes with Shevchenko’s lines is not merely the reviewers’ invention—the standard Muzyka edition prints a Shevchenko epigraph above each of the three preludes, so performers and listeners meet the poetry in the score itself; only whether the epigraphs are authorial or editorial remains open. The reviews are most useful as evidence of how the performances were experienced.

Because Op. 38 encodes identity as manner rather than quotation, what a listener experiences 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 Shevchenko text realised as 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 this transfer of an identity inscribed in modal idiom and poetic frame into a lived concert experience (Downey 2026).

These remain critics’ accounts and my own reading of the score. What I can add is the experience of the cycle in the hall. Kholodenko brought this programme to Prague’s Rudolfinum on 21 March 2026—his solo recital debut there—again placing Op. 38 between Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” and Liszt’s Paganini Études (Kholodenko 2026), and I heard it from the hall. I offer what follows not as independent confirmation of the critics—I came to the hall having read them, and cannot rule out their phrasing colouring my account—but as one situated hearing of how the score’s terms register in a room. 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, which is exactly the experience a recital makes available to a listener encountering Lyatoshynsky for the first time. The argument does not rest on this hearing: it stands on the documented public cases, and I record the live account as illustration—one listener’s situated experience—not as evidence that confirms the critics.

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 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 Fingerhut’s stated curatorial rationale makes the experiential argument legible: she selected works to convey Ukraine’s “multifaceted moods,” insisted that “Ukraine must claim her own,” and characterised the Op. 38bis preludes as “nationalism that was Ukraine in full battle mode,” followed by the Elegy-Prelude as “the mourning that follows the fighting” (Buja 2025). The framing is not the interview’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,” 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.

Fingerhut’s phrase is borne out by the writing itself. Where the Three Preludes evoke the folk without citing it, 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 tune in hard parallel intervals over a reiterated drone or ground bass, sharpened by a prominent tritone, so that the song turns 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 Fingerhut 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 experienced claim of national belonging is the curatorial act that names it, sequences it against the elegy, and so makes it heard. The contrast the two cycles stage—literal song made martial here, folk manner made elegiac in Op. 38—is what a curator who sets the Op. 38bis preludes against the 1920 “Elegy-Prelude” as “the mourning that follows the fighting” turns into an experience of Ukrainian identity for the listener.

The curatorial sequence is itself meaning-making. Placing the folk-song–based Op. 38bis—the one cycle that quotes literal Ukrainian melodies—against an elegiac companion stages a narrative of struggle and mourning that the listener experiences 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. §3). The recording thus enacts identity through selection, ordering, paratext, and even its charitable destination.

What a recording cannot do is hand the listener the freedom of the concert hall. In a recital one may arrive late, read the programme out of order, or attend to a single piece; on a disc the running order is fixed, and the audition unfolds as the curator has set it down. 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. 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 the listener receives whole, the argument made not only in the notes but in everything arranged around them.

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 within which a listener encountering the preludes is already primed 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 recital programming, and the curated recording discussed above—thus form a single reception ecology rather than a set of isolated events, and each lends the others its authority. 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 can no longer be received as a neutral juxtaposition; audiences now read such programming 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 the 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, and the contrast with the recital and the album, which do configure a Ukrainian listening, shows that performance and curation are doing identity-work that is neither automatic nor reducible to the notes—the same repertory framed otherwise yields a different experience. That negative case is admittedly oblique—an orchestral programme of the Third Symphony rather than a performance of the preludes themselves—so it bounds the claim more than it proves it; but a thesis able to name a framing it would not fit is, to that extent, not self-confirming. 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. Conclusion

Read together, these cases suggest that the Ukrainian identity of Lyatoshynsky’s piano preludes, though encoded in the score, is not finished there: it is realised as a present-day experience through performance and curation, and—in the curatorial case most of all—given meaning the notes do not themselves fix. The interpretive choices of a performer, the legitimating logic of a recital programme, the semiotics of a flag pin, and the narrative shaping of an album all participate in affording, for the listener they address, an experience of national belonging that the score makes possible without, by itself, completing. 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 situated first-hand hearing—rather than 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 prior readings locate the preludes’ Ukrainian identity in the score’s image-thematic design (Hmyrin 2024; Oliinyk 2012), this article follows that identity outward into the performance and curation that realise it for a present-day listener—and shows the framing is not automatic, since a programme can also withhold or blur the identity, as the “melded” orchestral pairing does. What performance and curation 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 experienced rather than only read.