Memory That Sounds: Kharkiv Remembers Valeriy Altukhov
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 8 October 2026
On 5 October 2026, musicians in Kharkiv gathered not merely to commemorate a distinguished teacher and clarinettist, but to demonstrate one of the more remarkable features of Ukrainian cultural life during wartime: its refusal to allow the past to fall silent.
There is something particularly appropriate about the title chosen for the concert that took place at Kharkiv’s Theatre and Concert Centre on 5 October: “Memory That Sounds” (Пам’ять, що звучить). The concert, organised around the 85th anniversary of the birth of Valeriy Mykolayovych Altukhov, who died in 2021, brought together his pupils, colleagues and friends. It is an act of remembrance, but in contemporary Kharkiv almost every cultural event has acquired a significance beyond the intentions of its organisers. A concert in a city repeatedly attacked by Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs is inevitably also a declaration about what sort of city Kharkiv intends to remain.
Altukhov was one of those figures whose influence is difficult to measure because so much of it survives in other people. Born on 6 October 1941 in Kokand, in what is now Uzbekistan, he became an orphan during the Second World War and grew up in an orphanage. His musical abilities took him to a specialist music school in Tashkent and subsequently to the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied clarinet. He graduated with distinction in 1965 and came to Kharkiv the following year.
It was in Kharkiv that Altukhov found the institution with which his life would ultimately become inseparable. He taught clarinet at what is now the Kharkiv State Musical Lyceum and, after periods of professional work including service as principal clarinettist at the Kharkiv Regional Philharmonic, became director of the school in 1984. He remained its director until his death in 2021: almost four decades in which generations of unusually talented young musicians passed through an institution whose reputation extended far beyond Kharkiv.
Altukhov’s conception of musical education appears to have been considerably broader than teaching children to play their instruments correctly. The Lyceum’s account of his work describes his central educational principle as the discovery and development of the creative potential of each individual pupil. Under his leadership the school cultivated international contacts, competitions and festivals, while Altukhov himself helped establish or develop events involving young pianists, violinists and wind players. He was awarded the title Honoured Worker of Arts of Ukraine in 1996, became an honorary citizen of Kharkiv in 2017 and received the Ukrainian Order of Merit, third class, in 2018.
Yet these biographical facts only partly explain why an Altukhov memorial concert matters in October 2026. The more interesting answer lies in the peculiar relationship between teachers and cultural survival. Politicians leave speeches, generals leave memoirs and architects leave buildings. A great teacher leaves people. Those people leave other people, and consequently an educational tradition can reproduce itself across generations almost invisibly. The audience listening to Altukhov’s former pupils is therefore hearing something more complicated than a succession of musical performances. They are hearing the continuation of a chain.
That chain has become especially precious because Kharkiv is now fighting against the destruction of continuity itself. The Russian war against Ukraine has been conducted against electricity substations and apartment blocks, but it has also placed enormous pressure upon schools, universities, theatres, museums and concert halls. A city under bombardment naturally concentrates upon survival, and yet survival cannot mean only keeping human bodies alive. A city is an accumulated system of habits, memories, institutions, jokes, buildings, teachers, friendships and rituals. Destroy enough of these things and eventually the geographical location remains while the city itself has disappeared.
This is one reason culture assumes an unexpectedly practical importance during war. A piano recital cannot intercept a Shahed drone. A clarinet cannot stop a ballistic missile. A conservatoire cannot restore an electricity grid. Nevertheless these things answer the question for which military defence exists in the first place: what exactly are we defending? If Kharkiv were merely a collection of concrete structures and transport infrastructure, there would be little reason to rebuild it every time it is damaged. Kharkiv matters because of the civilisation contained within those structures, and music is one of the ways in which that civilisation is transmitted.
There is an additional poignancy in Altukhov’s biography. He was born during the Second World War and lost his parents amid its catastrophe. Music provided a route from an orphanage in Central Asia into a lifetime of teaching, performance and cultural institution-building. Eighty-five years after his birth, another generation of children is growing up amid another European war. Some have lost parents; many have lost homes; virtually all have learned vocabulary that children ought never to need: shelter, missile, drone, interception, curfew and air-raid alarm. The historical parallel should not be exaggerated, but neither can it be ignored.
Altukhov’s story therefore carries an unusually powerful message for wartime Kharkiv. A childhood disfigured by war need not determine the boundaries of an adult life. From the destruction surrounding one child in the 1940s eventually emerged a teacher responsible for cultivating generations of musicians. That is not sentimental optimism. It is evidence of the extraordinary distances a human life may travel once somebody recognises talent and creates an institution capable of nurturing it.
This is why specialist schools such as the Kharkiv State Musical Lyceum are more important than they can sometimes appear from outside the world of classical music. They are repositories of standards. They teach young people that excellence is obtained through patience, repetition, criticism, discipline and an almost unreasonable attention to detail. These are values that extend beyond music. Indeed they are among the values upon which any sophisticated society depends. Altukhov seems to have understood that the objective was not merely to manufacture technically accomplished musicians but to permit distinctive personalities to emerge through musical education. The Lyceum remembers that he dreamed in his later years of creating a “school of the future”, equipped with excellent instruments and connected to the wider international musical world.
There is also something characteristically Kharkiv about holding such an event now. Kharkiv has always been a city whose grandeur is slightly concealed. Kyiv possesses the status of the capital; Odesa possesses its mythology; Lviv possesses an architectural theatricality that advertises itself immediately to the visitor. Kharkiv is more complicated. Its intellectual and cultural traditions have often existed alongside factories, Soviet monumentalism, universities, scientific institutes and sprawling residential districts. One discovers the city gradually, frequently behind doors that initially appear unpromising.
Then one enters a concert hall.
Suddenly another Kharkiv becomes visible: professors, musicians, students, parents, children carrying instrument cases and elderly teachers who remember several generations of pupils. The cultural infrastructure of the city reveals itself not as an ornament added to urban life but as one of the mechanisms by which Kharkiv understands itself. Altukhov belonged to this Kharkiv, and for nearly forty years as director of the specialist music school he helped reproduce it from one generation to the next.
The concert’s timing also provides a useful corrective to the way foreigners sometimes perceive Ukraine. International reporting necessarily concentrates upon front lines, weapons deliveries, diplomatic manoeuvres, corruption scandals and casualty figures. These are important subjects, but an exclusive diet of them creates a distorted picture in which Ukraine becomes merely a battlefield populated by soldiers, politicians and victims. Real countries do not live like that, even during wars. People fall in love, argue with their neighbours, take their children to school, complain about prices, drink too much, read books, attend concerts and practise scales.
Indeed the continuation of ordinary cultural life may be one of the quietest forms of resistance available to a society under attack. Russia can compel Kharkiv residents to check air-raid applications. It can force concert organisers to think about shelters and electricity. It can interrupt performances and damage buildings. What it cannot easily accomplish is persuading Kharkiv that music has ceased to matter. Every time the city insists upon holding another exhibition, lecture, theatrical production or concert, it rejects the proposition that war must monopolise Ukrainian consciousness.
“Memory That Sounds” is therefore an unusually apt phrase. Memory is often imagined as something static: photographs, monuments, plaques and archives. Musical memory is different because it must constantly be recreated. A score sitting unopened on a shelf makes no sound. Someone must pick up the instrument, practise, breathe and play. In that sense musical memory survives only through human action.
On 5 October, Altukhov’s pupils, colleagues and friends performed in the Theatre and Concert Centre at 25 Sumska Street. The date fell one day before what would have been his 85th birthday. The man himself was of course not there, but this is precisely the point of such an evening. Teachers survive through the standards they demanded, the enthusiasm they transmitted and the pupils who subsequently teach others. Altukhov’s legacy has escaped the boundaries of his own lifetime.
For a city living under the shadow of war, that may be the most important lesson of all. Buildings can be damaged and institutions can be displaced, but culture possesses an unusual capacity to migrate from one human being to another. It can hide in memory until circumstances allow it to flourish again. Valeriy Altukhov began life as a child orphaned by one terrible war and spent much of his adult life teaching young people how to make music. Five years after his death, while another war surrounds the city to which he devoted his career, those people will gather and play.
And so the title of the concert is more than an elegant phrase. Memory that sounds is memory that remains alive. In Kharkiv, in October 2026, making it sound is itself an assertion of civilisation.
