Borys Buyevsky

Borys Buyevsky was born in Kryvyi Rih on 7 June 1934 and trained as a composer at the Kharkiv Conservatory, where he studied composition with Klebanov and graduated in 1959. That same year he began teaching at a music school in Donetsk, a post he held until 1961, when he settled in Kiev.

His first recognition came with popular songs, a genre in which he was one of the first composers on the left bank of the Dnieper to draw on the folklore of the Carpathian region. In parallel, he wrote a considerable amount of music for film.

From the 1970s onwards his activity centred above all on the symphony, with works that incorporated features rarely found in Ukrainian music, such as the evocations of urban life in the second and sixth symphonies, or the elements of farce and the grotesque in the fourth and ninth. His legacy also encompasses ballets, concertos for solo instrument and vocal works, and his contribution places Buyevsky among the composers who renewed the Ukrainian symphonic language of his generation.