Stefano Pagliantini, Bassano del Grappa, July 27, 2026
Read this review in Italian here
Antonii Baryshevskyi is among the most interesting pianists of his generation. Born in Kyiv in 1988, he has transformed the prestige he earned in major international competitions into a springboard for defining his own artistic identity. Victories at the Busoni Prize in Bolzano, the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, and the Jaén Prize have established his name on the international scene, but the most significant aspect of his career remains his constant search for a personal voice, far from pre-established interpretative formulas.
This attitude emerged clearly in the recital presented in the Cloister of the Civic Museum in Bassano del Grappa as part of the Operaestate Festival, in collaboration with the Fondazione Amici della Fenice and the VeneziaPianoFestival. Tackling Chopin's Four Ballades in the same concert means grappling with as many ways of constructing time, organizing tension, and transforming the piano into a narrative voice. Baryshevskyi approached them following a coherent interpretative approach: attention to architecture, meticulous attention to dynamic gradations, and a constantly rigorously controlled agogic freedom.
The concert revealed a pianist disinclined to immediate solutions.
Baryshevskyi does not seek to captivate the listener through the simple beauty of sound or flaunted virtuosity. His playing proceeds through minimal variations, shifts in weight, suspensions, and almost imperceptible modifications of phrasing.
In the Ballades, this analytical approach produced a reading far removed from sentimentality and Romantic rhetoric. Chopin's song was not abandoned to spontaneous continuity, but questioned and sometimes put under pressure. Pauses took on a structural value, while thematic reprises appeared as returns transformed by what had happened in the interim.
The Ukrainian pianist's technical certainty is unquestionable. Clarity of line, independence of voices, and precision in the densest passages never wavered. Even more significant was the way he differentiated the sound levels, bringing out an inner voice, an accompaniment figure, or a harmonic detail normally left in the background.
The result was a mobile and restless Chopin, observed from constantly shifting perspectives. At times, however, the desire to control each passage ended up limiting the music's propulsive force. The great culminations of the Ballades also require a willingness to lose, at least apparently, control of the narrative. Baryshevskyi, on the other hand, firmly held the reins of the performance even in the most incandescent passages. This prudence did not compromise the overall coherence, but made certain explosions less inevitable. This is perhaps the limit, but also the clearest characteristic of his interpretation: a Romanticism explored with critical intelligence, without concessions to abandon.
After the interval, the program changed shape. No longer a single composer and four great narrative constructions, but a succession of "studies" from different eras and languages. Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Ligeti, Svyatoslav Lunyov, and Maxim Shalygin were juxtaposed to demonstrate derivations, continuities, internal assonances, but also the modifications that the etude genre can undergo over time.
It was precisely in this area that Baryshevskyi seemed most at ease. Freed from the burden of Chopin's great architectural structures, he was able to react to the specificity of each piece, rapidly modifying his touch, articulation, and relationship to tempo.
In Debussy's etudes, technique seemed to arise directly from listening to timbre. The figurations became mobile surfaces, in which every shift in register altered the perception of space. With Ligeti, however, the piano took on a more physical dimension: rhythmic overlays, shifted accents, and repetitive mechanisms tested the lucidity of the performer, called upon to maintain legibility in a writing that was constantly on the verge of escaping its own rules.
The compositions by Lunyov and Shalygin did not appear as simple contemporary appendages or as tributes dictated by national belonging. Their presence altered the meaning of the entire program. In these works, the difficulty manifested itself not through speed or power, but in the ability to sustain fragile sonorities, prolonged resonances, and gestures reduced to the essential.
Baryshevskyi respected their character without artificially accentuating their evocative aspect. The reference to Ukrainian music remained important, but did not exhaust its meaning. Rather, a different conception of piano material emerged, based less on the affirmation of the gesture and more on listening to what remains after the gesture.
With Liszt, the breadth of the keyboard and the full availability of virtuosic means returned to the forefront. Here too, the pianist avoided any ostentation. The difficulty was evident, but not emphasized; the movement was controlled with confidence and inserted into a precise conception of the piece.
The final return to Chopin allowed us to see the composer who had dominated the first part in a different light. In the two Etudes, the concentration on a specific piano problem seemed to free Baryshevskyi from the burden of the grand Romantic narrative, making his pianism more direct without sacrificing accuracy. This interpretation won over the large audience, who at the end gave him a warm and well-deserved acclaim.
