Review. A Bassano del Grappa il pianismo d’autore di Baryshevskyi
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by Stefano Nardelli, July 29, 2026
It's not just a fascinating space: the Cloister of the Bassano del Grappa Civic Museum possesses an architectural dimension that offers a particularly apt setting for piano music, enhancing both its intimacy and rich timbre. This refined Renaissance setting hosted the second event in the collaboration between OperaEstate Festival Veneto, Fondazione Amici della Fenice, and VeneziaPianoFestival, entrusted to Ukrainian pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi following the debut of the young Daniele Martinelli, winner of the 2025 Venice Prize. The large audience attended the program with intense concentration, greeting the artist with warm applause at the end.
Baryshevskyi belongs to that generation of Eastern European pianists who grew up in a solid technical tradition yet remain open to personal interpretative exploration. Born in Kiev in 1988, Antonii Baryshevskyi rose to international attention thanks to his successes in the Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, the Horowitz Competition in Kiev, and the Orleans Competition. The turning point, however, came in 2011 at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano, where he won second prize in an edition that went down in history for not being awarded first prize. This decision provoked protests from jury president Martha Argerich and helped introduce to the general public a pianist already gifted with a highly personal interpretive voice.
In Bassano, Baryshevskyi confirmed precisely the quality that makes his pianism recognizable: a rare ability to combine virtuosic control and imaginative freedom, structural precision and visionary impetus.
The four Chopin Ballades that opened the concert—unlike the program presented in March at the VeneziaPianoFestival, where they closed after the 24 Preludes, Op. 28—appeared like a veritable interpretative manifesto.
Baryshevskyi did not seek a polished or simply poetic reading of the Polish composer, but restored his full narrative and dramatic nature, highlighting the fractures, internal tensions, and sudden shifts in perspective.
Each Ballade thus became an organism in transformation, traversed by extreme contrasts: luminous outbursts and shadowy areas, violent explosions of sound and almost immaterial suspensions. A strongly "authorial" reading, in which Chopin was not a monument to the past but a restless and contemporary presence.
The second half of the program confirmed the intelligence of the composition, constructed as a journey through different conceptions of the relationship between pianistic gesture, color, and sonic matter. From Debussy's two Études (No. 1, "Pour les cinq doigts" and No. 11, "Pour les arpèges composés"), with their balance between abstraction and timbral sensuality, we moved on to the surprising architectures of György Ligeti, where the piano becomes a rhythmic and perceptive laboratory. Two tributes to contemporary Ukrainian music also fit perfectly into this exploration of sound: Svyatoslav Lunyov's rarefied "Adieu, étude pour piano" and Maxim Shalygin's "Au vent sur la pointe des pieds," a suspended and almost tactile passage from the Fetus Études. More than simple national parentheses, they were traces of a wounded sensibility still capable of imagining new poetic spaces.
Liszt's virtuosity found in Baryshevskyi an interpreter capable of avoiding any external spectacularity: the luminous pointillism of Waldesrauschen and the swirling snowscape of Chasse neige became studies in color and depth, not simple tests of skill. Ideally closing the circle were two Chopin Études, No. 3 in E major, "Tristesse," and the celebrated No. 12 in C minor, Op. 10, "The Fall of Warsaw," delivered with a tragic and meditative force that drew some of the evening's warmest applause. The variety of worlds explored—from visionary Romanticism to the most radical modernity—thus found a common thread in the search for a piano understood not as an instrument, but as a human space: memory, restlessness, energy, and resistance.
A concert of great maturity, in which Antonii Baryshevskyi displayed an overwhelming dynamic and color palette, but above all an authentically personal interpretive voice.
Photo credit: Francesco dal Pian