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

Abstract

The piano preludes of Borys Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968)—the Three Preludes, Op. 38, the Two Preludes Based on the Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Songs, Op. 38bis, and the Five Preludes, Op. 44, all composed during the 1942–43 wartime evacuation—have re-entered Western concert life as vehicles of Ukrainian identity. This article asks how performing and curating the preludes afford an experience of Ukrainian identity for the present-day listener, extending the Ukrainian analytical literature on the cycles outward into curation and Western wartime reception. Drawing on recent documented cases—Vadym Kholodenko’s recital programming of Op. 38 alongside the canonical European repertory, and Margaret Fingerhut’s curated album Ukraine: A Piano Portrait—it argues that performance and curation operate not as distinct operations but as interacting practices: different degrees and forms of mediation through which the preludes’ folkloric idiom is configured as Ukrainian for the listener they address. The preludes’ internal difference between literal folk-song quotation (Op. 38bis) and folk intonation (Opp. 38 and 44) becomes a resource that performers and curators mobilise. Situating these cases within three documented strands of Lyatoshynsky’s re-reception during the Russo-Ukrainian war—orchestral, pianistic, and scholarly—the article reframes the wartime prelude as a site where national identity is configured for present-day listeners through layered acts of mediation.