Phoenix Quartet, Violina Petrychenko: Ukrainian Piano Quintets

The Strad Issue: September 2025

Description: Passionate accounts of rarely heard Ukrainian quintets

Musicians: Phoenix Quartet, Violina Petrychenko (piano)

Works: Barvinsky: Piano Quintet in G minor. Lyatoshynsky: Piano Quintet in G minor

Catalogue number: ARS-PRODUKTION ARS38684

Violina Petrychenko has been recording the piano repertoire of her native Ukraine for a good deal longer than the course of the present war with Russia. Founded in 2008 and based in Lviv, the Phoenix Quartet also brings experience and a feeling for the post-Romantic hinterland of these G minor quintets.

Almost all of Barvinsky’s music was burnt by the Soviet authorities after he was sent to a labour camp in 1948. Released a decade later, he reconstructed from memory pieces such as this quintet from 1912. Thus both its spirit of melancholy and fragmentary state are inseparable from the process of its (re)creation. A yearning sonata-form first movement lays the groundwork for a big heroic narrative. However, what follows is a sombre four-minute chorale for strings, and the rest is silence.

The sense of tragic incompletion to Barvinsky’s piece is intensified by its juxtaposition with the grand, cyclic design of Lyatoshynsky’s quintet, written during World War II. The piano writing breathes the same air as Rachmaninoff’s keyboard thinking, but the Ukrainian composer’s architecture is less fluid, more sturdy, and strongly inflected by native folk song. There is a good deal more pleasure to be taken here, from the rounded tone and grateful phrasing of the Phoenix, than a rival Naxos version.

The booklet essay argues for Lyatoshynsky’s ‘symphonic’ approach. In fact, Petrychenko and her admirable colleagues lean into the lively and tender lyric polyphony that makes Lyatoshynsky’s piece much less orchestral in sound than (say) the piano quintets by Medtner and Shostakovich, and a compelling discovery in its own right.

PETER QUANTRILL