"The recital at the Muziekgebouw brings him a little closer to his country again. The program features a century of Ukrainian music history with works by four generations of composers: Borys Lyatoshinsky (1895-1968), Valentin Silvestrov (1937), Svyatoslav Lunyov (1964) and Maxim Shalygin (1985).
"Liatoshinskyi is the father of the modern Ukrainian school of composers. He began as a modernist, but fell prey to the antimodernism campaigns of the Soviet dictatorship and had to 'simplify' his music. Yet both his early and late work is deep and moving at the same time. Lunyov plays with all sorts of styles. I am doing parts from his cycle Mardongs, in which he walks through musical history, from the Middle Ages to the present."
And then there is his contemporary Shalygin, who lives in The Hague and who "brought" Baryshevskyi to the Netherlands. "His music has powerful feelings and colors. Sometimes I have the feeling that while playing, a door suddenly swings open to another dimension. Music is at its most beautiful when listeners can get lost in it, that afterwards you don't know exactly what happened to you, how long it took."