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For acclaimed Ukrainian–Australian pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk, music expresses the glory of human possibility and freedom. By Kate Holden.
Pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk on submitting to his art
Pianist Alexander Gavrylyuk was 13 when his family migrated from Soviet-controlled Ukraine, and 40-odd years later, on a sunny winter’s day in Sydney, it’s still the word “individual” that he mentions over and over again. The piano, to which his talent bound him in childhood like a prisoner to a chain, might have become a hated symbol of former captivity, but instead it became the instrument of his liberation, his expressiveness and a brilliant career in music that has flung him into the major concert halls of the world. “That was the difference when I came to Australia: I realised the glory and the joy of the individual talent,” he says. “The individual expression is the key!”
He had been toiling in the “factory” of Soviet piano talent, practising 10 to 12 hours a day. “I had to really work quite a lot,” he says with understatement, “and ultimately sacrifice my whole childhood for the sake of piano.” He started playing at the age of seven, was publicly performing Bach – thousands of hours of practice later – at nine. He was paid with a box of toy cars.
With the move across the planet came a new sense of the universal communicative powers of music, how “it’s really one of the most advanced tools we as a society have, to unite ourselves on a deeper level”. What was glorious music in the Soviet Union was also beloved on the other side of the world. As a teenager, it was a way to sound out his emotions, his inner life. His dazzling fingers could crash and croon on the keys with all the intensity of adolescent tumult.
Practical liberty in the West also meant a freer relationship with the instrument he was still enthralled by. “When I was a little boy, I’d just try and follow the long, narrow road that was presented to me,” he says. “At that stage I knew very little about choices. The first stage, I was just surviving. Here I was able to observe the true meaning of the inner freedom and inner expression without constraints of the system I originally came from: fitting the norm of the system and the hierarchy and the expectation, rather than nurturing one’s individual talents.” Within two years he won both First Prize and the Gold Medal at the Horowitz International Piano Competition and, a year later, the top prize at the Hamamatsu competition in Japan.
Matured and long based in Sydney after the customary years abroad to extend his career, Gavrylyuk – a smiling man with pale skin and a deep, thoughtful voice – now speaks passionately of the potency of music as he prepares for his first appearance with the Australian Chamber Orchestra this month. The program – two works by Shostakovich, an arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and a specially commissioned work by contemporary Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov – has him musing on the ways his philosophy of music has evolved. First it was programmatic, the vehicle for a set of requirements and disciplines that cost him his individual will. Then it was a tool for his personal use, a vessel of emotion. Finally he began to perform in large concert venues and saw the way audiences too breathed and sighed along with him as they sensed the music.
“The more I played, the more these ideas solidified in me. Realisations and choices and my own philosophy and approach to music,” he says. “And of course, some literature helped. I remember reading a book by Stanislavski, who wrote the famous system for actors, where he diminished or disappeared as an ego, as a person, so he wasn’t really acting anymore, he was really living it. That’s something that played quite a profound role in my musical relationship. It became less about me and more about the universal ideas. Service to the celebration of our human spirit, the human individuality, the expression of the natural differences between us, and what we share also.”
Gavrylyuk still cherishes what he calls “this miracle” of a hundred-odd musicians on a stage for a symphony performance, working harmoniously as one. “They’re all breathing, their hearts are beating in the same rhythm, they’re all in absolute sync and balance and harmony, a kind of synchronicity which is a miracle in itself.
“Because,” he observes, “in all other areas of society we cannot achieve such synchronicity. To have that kind of collaboration on this level, this fine-tuning with one another, is really something that I believe should be studied: it’s such a miracle, how well we can actually collaborate together.
“We all bring the language of music together, which disregards all the differences: your background, your religion, your language, everything. This is something that really inspires me. It’s something so precious in our society, that should be really nurtured more.”
The flow of universal revelation in music might occur on the stage of London’s legendary Wigmore Hall, where Gavrylyuk has recently been artist in residence, or the Musikverein in Vienna or the other international and Australian venues where he has performed to thousands of people. Or in his own home, where he recalls playing Schumann’s tender Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) before he and his wife, Zoki, had their two daughters. He played it again afterwards, to the girls, “and I remember how it completely transformed itself. After you have children – this is my experience – the universe stops being inside your centre, and it is this sort of unconditional love towards the children that transforms you to a completely different angle; and when I played the Kinderszenen after the children were born it was really on a completely different sphere, a different parallel world.”
There are all kinds of transport, mystical and physical. The touring life is an intense one: another miracle of music is how just a few nimble, ordinary-looking fingers can produce so much beauty. In just the past few months, Gavrylyuk’s clever hands have been to, among other places, Luxembourg, Estonia, Amsterdam, Oxford, Athens, Auckland and Ukaria in the Adelaide Hills. When possible, his family joins him – including, recently, in Taiwan. “I get to expose them to this world of music-making, and art, and backstage, and how musicians live, and it’s such a unique, unusual area of our society. It’s nice to do that.”
Much of his time is spent, if not in airports, carefully preparing for performances. “One wants to really get under the skin of the composer but not pollute it with your individuality too much.” There’s that word again. “I’m trying to get into the mind of the composers as much as I can. For example, Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude: Chopin was feeling so much agony and pain about Poland at that time of invasion – once you really get into that personal, individual pain, this music sounds completely different.”
All impressive musicians are contemplative but not all can relate so sharply to the political and exile angst of the greatest composers. The USSR and the Russian empire before it produced great talent and wounded psyches – and unforgettable music. With the upcoming ACO program, Gavrylyuk can empathise with Shostakovich, whose Opus 35, the Piano Concerto No. 1, he will perform.
“The young Shostakovich, consciously or subconsciously, realised how important it is to preserve the individual within himself and to share the importance of that with the world, through his piece, his music. And you know, it’s the cornered individual, not the individual that’s nurtured – like with Gershwin, where we feel the exuberance, the swagger, the enjoyment of one’s expression, the freedom – but the cornered one, that screams for his right to exist and uses sarcasm, satire, uses irony, all these expressions, just to be heard, just to stand out, to be alive. This duality is quite interesting, to pair them together. So when I prepare for a piece, these are my stock pillars with which I build everything else.”
The concert includes a new work by Silvestrov, another kindred figure, “one of these relatively new voices of Ukraine, finally given his own identity, as well, after the Soviet period”.
It is the first time Gavrylyuk has worked with the ACO, “the best chamber orchestra in the world”, he says warmly, though he’s attended many concerts. He himself has been rated among the best pianists in the world, a soloist with, among others, the New York Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Netherlands, and since 2006 has held a desirable artist residency at the Chautauqua Institution in the United States.
“It’s a really idyllic, utopian place where they have a symphony orchestra, an opera, theatre productions, all kinds of departments for music and art and science and philosophy; every summer they all come together.”
Like most Australian classical musicians, he’d felt compelled to leave Australia in his 20s to advance his career: 15 years in Europe opened the right doors. Now he’s well established, but musicians have long arcs and can anticipate learning and improving over many decades. With mastery comes humility; the child prodigy subordinate to the system is now a mature artist submitting to his art. “To surrender, for the power of music to take control,” he says, “it’s about us allowing for the music to take the lead, as opposed to having the illusion of creating the interpretation.” He laughs. “It’s the joy of creating in the moment, being in the moment and being able to have the freedom to create without any constraint. So this is something I really value.”
“Something miraculous burns in music,” wrote the Ukrainian poet Anna Akhmatova in a poem in tribute to Shostakovich, who understood well the cost of annihilation; “as you watch, its edges crystallize. / Only music speaks to me / when others turn away their eyes.”
Gavrylyuk was born and raised in Kharkiv, now monstered by Russian forces. When he was 17, a car accident nearly killed him, and he is grateful to Australia for its mediation of his musical career, and for literally saving his life.
From this safe distance he read Russian literature, was deeply influenced by Russian art and music, learnt from observing the great Russian masters of piano such as Vladimir Horowitz and was praised by and worked with the famous Icelandic–Russian Vladimir Ashkenazy. For several months as a young man, Gavrylyuk – along with Zoki – lived in Moscow while he studied and collaborated with exceptional talents.
Now he uses his life’s store of learning, the technical faculties taught in the Soviet system, the example of great masters such as Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, to apply music to atrocity.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 16, 2025 as "The joy of becoming".
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