Music of Lyudkevych in arrangements for piano four hands and two pianos

Abstract

The creative legacy of Stanislav Lyudkevych occupies a pivotal position in the annals of Ukrainian music history. Alongside his grand symphonic and choral compositions, the composer also delved into chamber genres, with piano music being particularly prominent. A distinctive segment of his oeuvre comprises works crafted for piano ensembles. In addition to original compositions for piano duets, there exist authorial arrangements of his own works for piano four hands and for two pianos At various times, other artists have also engaged with Lyudkevych’s works for the purpose of creating arrangements. For piano four hands, we encounter arrangements by Mykhailo Shved and Natalia Yuzyk, and for two pianos by Isidor Vymer and Nikodym Plaksyuk. The purpose of the article is to describe the existing translations of S. Liudkiewicz’s works for piano ensembles and to identify the reasons for their appearance. The source base is the autographs of the composer’s works, music editions of the author’s translations, as well as translations by other artists for four hands or two pianos. The research methodology is based on the use of the following methods: analytical and systematisation for processing scientific sources and music literature within the scope of the study; source studies, which allowed to attract archival materials (autographs, first editions, concert programmes, etc.; textual) and establish the exact text of manuscript music materials; empirical methods for observing performances of leading piano duets, self-observation, comparison and generalisation of the results obtained. This article examines the arrangements of S. Lyudkevych’s works for piano four hands and for two pianos, drawing on preserved autographs, lifetime editions, and the contributions of other artists. It traces the motivations behind the emergence of authorial four-hand arrangements and elucidates the objectives of other composers and educators in creating these arrangements of Lyudkevych’s works. The article outlines directions for further scholarly inquiry into the chosen topic: the search for lost pages of the composer’s legacy, the restoration of rediscovered works (Capriccio), the classification of existing arrangements by their technical complexity, and the undertaking of analogous studies on the works of other Ukrainian artists.