In the cool stone interior of Tbilisi’s Evangelical-Lutheran Church, two musicians—pianist Dasha Moroz-Khidasheli and violinist Anna Dzialak-Savytska—offered an evening of remembrance and resilience, of silence and resonance, of Europe’s tremors echoing through music’s most transparent structures. They dedicated their performance to four anniversaries: International Music Day, the 90th birthdays of Arvo Pärt and Gia Kancheli, and the tragic historical date of the deportation of Germans from the Caucasus. Each of these threads formed part of a larger tapestry—a reflection on belonging, exile, and the intimate endurance of sound when language falters.
The church, with its Lutheran austerity, framed the evening like a monochrome painting: precise, ascetic, and yet charged with a subterranean intensity. The air seemed to hum even before the first note of Pärt’s Fratres.
Pärt’s Fratres—the 1980 version for violin and piano, dedicated to Gidon and Elena Kremer—has long been both invocation and meditation. The tintinnabuli structure, that sparse arithmetic of bells and breathing, has the quality of a ritual enacted by two voices who circle each other without ever fusing. Dzialak-Savytska and Moroz-Khidasheli performed it without theatricality. Their restraint felt deliberate, almost ascetic. The violin’s tone—thin and luminous—moved through the slow rotations of the harmonic field as if tracing the geometry of prayer. The piano responded with the same quiet inevitability, each chord a kind of measured exhalation.
It was difficult to miss how this minimalism transformed the church into a resonant body—its walls breathing along with the music. Pärt’s logic of repetition, his insistence on the sacred through reduction, resonated with the evening’s broader spiritual charge: the persistence of faith amid ruin, the endurance of pattern when narrative collapses.
From Pärt’s monastic timelessness, the program pivoted to Mozart’s Sonata in E minor, K.304. Composed in 1778, in the wake of his mother’s death in Paris, it remains one of his most austere and grief-marked works. Here, the violin and piano seem caught in an unequal dialogue—two solitudes, circling loss. Dzialak-Savytska and Moroz-Khidasheli rendered it with unforced clarity. The first movement’s lean phrases carried a kind of exhausted nobility, while the Tempo di Menuetto felt almost like a subdued farewell dance—grace drained of joy.
In the context of this concert, Mozart’s private grief became a hinge—a point where individual pain opened toward historical mourning.
Valentin Silvestrov, often described as the last Romantic of Eastern Europe, brings to music an almost metaphysical nostalgia—the sense that everything has already been said, that the composer merely writes “post scripts.” His Sonata Post Scriptum (1990) and Nostalgia (2001) framed the evening’s emotional center. The two works—one a fragile echo of Mozartian syntax, the other an exercise in transparency—unfolded like whispered commentary on the classical canon.
Moroz-Khidasheli played Silvestrov’s phrases as if reading from a palimpsest: traces of vanished melodies visible beneath the surface, like names half-erased from an old gravestone. The violin line in the Andantino of the Sonata drifted in and out of tonality, like a radio signal fading into silence. Silvestrov’s statement that “music should be so transparent that you can see through it” came alive here—music as memory’s glass, thin enough to fracture under touch.
Tommaso Antonio Vitali’s Chaconne, in Leopold Charlier’s late-Romantic transcription, followed. The piece itself is an enigma—its stylistic hybridism long prompting doubts about its Baroque authorship. Yet in this setting, its harmonic wanderings felt like a historical allegory: Europe’s own dissonant journey from order to fragmentation.
Dzialak-Savytska’s phrasing oscillated between restraint and eruption. Moroz-Khidasheli matched her with finely articulated voicing, giving the illusion of an orchestra compressed into two instruments. The Chaconne’s chromatic descent—those centuries-old modulations that refuse to resolve—became a metaphor for Europe’s unfinished mourning.
Midway through the evening, Dzialak-Savytska paused. In a steady, clear voice, she told the audience that she was from Ukraine—and that, the day before, her teacher had called to tell her that a former classmate had been killed at the front. The church fell silent. The following piece, an unplanned inclusion, was Melody by Myroslav Skoryk.
Few compositions have so quietly absorbed a nation’s grief. Skoryk’s Melody, written in the 1980s and long transformed into an unofficial Ukrainian elegy, is simple in structure—an arch of lyrical lament—but its emotional gravity depends on who plays it and when. Dzialak-Savytska’s bow carried that immediacy of news turned into sound. Moroz-Khidasheli’s accompaniment was spare, reverent, almost suspended. The performance didn’t seek to dramatize loss—it was loss, contained and translated into tone.
The evening closed with miniatures by Gia Kancheli—music suspended between irony and prayer. The Georgian composer, whose career bridged symphonies, theater, and cinema, often treated his own film music as fragments of a single long composition—melancholy distilled into sound. In these pieces, the violin and piano converse like two old friends recalling a shared dream. Dzialak-Savytska and Moroz-Khidasheli found in Kancheli’s hesitant lyricism a rare equilibrium: a tone of both farewell and endurance.
Kancheli once remarked that he could no longer remember where a musical image first appeared—in a symphony or a film. That porousness, between high and applied art, between the sacred and the everyday, became the concert’s unspoken theme.
To dedicate a concert to four anniversaries—two composers’ 90th birthdays, a day celebrating music, and a historical deportation—might have seemed too much. Yet the evening’s coherence emerged through tone rather than rhetoric. It was an act of cultural archaeology: excavating the layers of European memory through sound.
In a century fractured by displacement and war, the quiet persistence of chamber music acquires new political meaning. Each bow stroke, each suspended piano resonance, becomes a small gesture of survival. In Tbilisi’s Lutheran church the concert’s message was less a declaration than a murmur—a reminder that music, at its most humane, is a language of the afterlife.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
