is widely regarded as Ukraine's greatest living composer, but until early 2022, the title work here, , was largely unknown outside the country (and himself was far from a household name). The work was composed at the piano by as a kind of chronicle of the pro-Western Euromaidan demonstrations of 2013 and 2014, reworked for the fine , and recorded in 2016. For obvious reasons, its patriotic and prayerful texts lifted it onto classical best-seller charts in 2022, during which year fled Ukraine and settled temporarily in Berlin. Even without the stimulus of current events, the work marked a new aspect in the thinking of , whose career has traced many seismic shifts. He terms the work "a cycle of cycles," with each cycle consisting of from three to five short pieces, the first of which is a section of Ukraine's national anthem. Most are sacred, but there are other patriotic texts as well as some of an elegiac nature. The whole thing represents an inflection of 's lyrical, neo-Renaissance style in the direction of public statements and away from the inward quality it has had for many years. Several shorter works, a set of plus a and , date from slightly later and are more typical of 's recent work. 's excellent engineering is accomplished at St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv, whose bells rang during the Euromaidan protests for the first time in alarm since the Mongol siege of Kyiv in the year 1240. An album vitally connected to the events of the day, it may well be seen as a landmark of the period. ~ James Manheim