By Olha Chepil | 2026-06-25

A war is rewriting the map of European classical music and putting Ukraine on it prominently.

For decades, Ukrainian composers were treated as a footnote to Russian music, dismissed as provincial unless they had ties to Moscow. Now European festivals are racing to perform their work, conductors are touring war-torn cities to support local orchestras, and a piece once unknown outside Ukraine opens a Polish radio broadcast every single day. The shift didn't come from a marketing campaign.

A personal mission

Austrian conductor, pianist, organist and composer Florian Reithner looked drained but driven on the train ride back from Kharkiv to Vienna. He had just conducted the premiere of his new six-song cycle, written for the youth orchestra of the Kharkiv Music Festival -- in a city that faces daily shelling.

Reithner has no Ukrainian roots. He came because he believes it's necessary.

"Ukraine is currently defending the freedom of all of Europe. We, Austrian musicians, cannot change the course of the war. But we can come, support the people, and then tell Europe what we saw," Reithner told Kontur.

He first traveled to Ukraine in 2024 as an improvising pianist at the Kharkiv Music Festival and returned this time by invitation, as a composer.

Sitting next to him was Ukrainian organist Dariia Lytvishko, a friend he met on Facebook after she reached out, struck that an Austrian with no personal connection to Ukraine was creating projects specifically for Ukrainian musicians.

She told Kontur it left a deep impression on her, and that she wrote to tell him so. Since 2022, Lytvishko has performed roughly 45 benefit concerts across Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada, raising about 70,000 euros for aid organizations supporting Ukraine, including funds sent directly to the front lines.

This was the first trip to Kharkiv for both musicians, and Lytvishko is still processing it.

"I have probably never encountered such positivity and vital energy anywhere else," she said, describing how welcoming and grateful people were despite the conditions they live under.

"I felt humbled when they thanked us for our courage. We only came for a few days. They are the ones who stayed," she added.

On February 24, the anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Reithner and Lytvishko organized a volunteer-run benefit concert at Vienna's Jesuit Church, accepting donations online in real time. Contributions came in from Europe, the United States and Australia, raising 2,000 euros for the Kharkiv youth orchestra by night's end.

In March 2027, the Lviv National Opera will premiere Reithner's opera "Duma of the Non-Azov Brothers," based on a dramatic poem by Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko, who helped refine the Ukrainian-language libretto herself.

An invisible music

Violinist Illya Korol was born in Kyiv, studied in Moscow and has lived in Austria since 1997. He specializes in early music performed on period instruments and founded moderntimes_1800, a chamber orchestra that has performed with stars like Rene Jacobs and Anna Prohazka.

Korol speaks candidly about how Ukrainian classical music was treated before the war.

"Nobody knew anything specifically about Ukraine. Only a few names — those championed by Gidon Kremer or those connected to Moscow. Everything else was treated as periphery," Korol told Kontur.

He described this as a systemic policy: Moscow served as the sole cultural center, leaving Ukrainian, Armenian and Georgian composers in the shadows unless they had Russian ties. Even Borys Lyatoshynsky, one of the 20th century's greatest Ukrainian composers, remained largely unknown abroad.

Korol said he didn't know half of this music himself, despite having studied at a Soviet conservatory.

The war changed that. European conductors, singers and festivals began exploring Ukrainian repertoire -- not only out of solidarity, but because they found a rich musical tradition they had overlooked.

When Ukrainian musicians arrived in Vienna in 2022, Korol helped them find work, housing and conservatory placements. Most are now fully employed in Vienna's musical scene, he said, and foreign visitors to Ukraine have repeatedly been struck by the talent of young performers there.

"I was told that every second musician there is a potential opera soloist," Korol recalled. "The war achieved what decades failed to do."

Musical diplomacy

Mariana Bondarenko, head of music at the Ukrainian Institute, said comprehensive data on international concerts featuring Ukrainian artists is hard to come by because tracking them centrally is difficult. Still, the trend is clear.

"We have seen a major shift since 2022, with Ukrainian music gaining both a larger and far more meaningful foothold on the international stage," Bondarenko told Kontur.

Ukrainian repertoire now appears on European programs as part of the cultural mainstream, she said, not as a gesture of solidarity. She pointed to the annual UK-Ukraine Cultural Seasons in London and the Open Opera Ukraine platform, which won a 2024 European Early Music Award for its album "Ukrainian Baroque: Concordacii Animos."

Myroslav Skoryk's "Melody" has become a defining symbol of the shift, echoing across Europe since 2022. One Polish radio host opens every broadcast with the piece and has vowed to continue until the war ends. Interest is also surging in composers like Lyatoshynsky, Valentyn Sylvestrov and Yevhen Stankovych, whose scores were long hard for foreign performers to find.

Last year, celebrations marking the 130th anniversary of Lyatoshynsky's birth included 13 projects -- concerts, conferences and exhibitions -- across three continents and seven countries.

European institutions increasingly treat Ukrainian musicians as equal partners rather than one-off acts, Bondarenko said. To build on that, the Ukrainian Institute recently joined three international networks: the Europe Jazz Network, the European Music Council and the European Folk Network.

"Ukraine's experience of keeping culture alive during wartime has become a vital part of the European professional dialogue on the role of art in the modern world," Bondarenko added.

Reithner frames his own mission in simpler terms. Musicians can't stop the war, he said, but they can bear witness -- by traveling, seeing the reality firsthand and telling others what they saw.

"When you tell these stories yourself, if you show what is happening, people perceive it completely differently," Reithner said. "This must not be forgotten."