Reviews on music of A. Shchetynsky

Zoran Minderovic. Web site http://allclassical.com
Alexander Shchetinsky is an important Ukrainian composer whose works, which include a variety of instrumental and vocal compositions, have been widely performed, to considerable acclaim, throughout Europe. Proficient in a variety of avant-garde modes of expression, Shchetinsky seeks, and attains, a personal synthesis of stylistic modalities, thereby transcending mere eclecticism.

Virko Baley. New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians
His style is essentially that of a structuralist, relying on a synthesis of a variety of modernist techniques and exploring in each piece a particular musical metaphor. This method explains his reliance on pieces with descriptive titles. The influence of an especially eastern European variety of minimalism (more meditative and less didactic) is also apparent in the carefully worked out relationship between different degrees of sound and silence, the predominance of soft dynamics, and in the smallest details and changes in pitch, timbre and rhythm.

Zoran Minderovic. Web site http://allclassical.com
For Shchetynsky, musical metaphor is the expressive formula which translates the composer's deepest intuitions into an intricately structured, subtle, sophisticated, enigmatic, but nevertheless essentially intelligible, sonic language, in which the common-sense boundaries between sound and silence remain fluid.

Booklet of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the concert series New Voices - New Choices
He is drawn to religious subjects. Glossolalie is based on a religious idea, as is The Preacher's Word, a powerful setting for soprano and string quartet of texts from the Old Testament. In 1992 this latter piece won First Prize at the Fourth Fribourg Sacred Music Competition in Switzerland.

Levon Hakopian. Muzykalnaya Akademiya, Moscow, 2000, #1
The chamber pieces by Alexander Shchetynsky (b. in 1960) - a composer from Kharkiv inclined to the "post-serial" idiom - testify his innate feeling for elegance and plasticity. His meticulously wrought Way to Meditation for five instruments (1990) is a kind of instrumental drama showing an interesting line of development; musical gourmets may enjoy it as a real delicacy.

Alexey Parin. Program note on the performance of Voices of the Invisible at the Helikon Opera, 1999
Alexander Shchetynsky established himself as a consequent stickler for avant-garde... His spirituality reveals in strict, ascetically beautiful sounds that are full of impression due to their hermetism, within the context of up-to-date musical language.

Alexander Shchetynsky may be contacted at:
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