Cutting Keys with Taylor Higgs presents Bandura: The Forbidden Instrument, featuring Ukrainian bandura player and singer Mariia Petrovska.
A rare live concert of Ukrainian bandura, voice and grand piano, created as a one-off fusion performance between Ukrainian tradition and jazz/classical piano.
The bandura is one of Ukraine’s most distinctive traditional instruments: a 55–65+ string instrument with the resonance of a harp, the intimacy of a lute and the bright, ringing quality of a zither. Often described as the voice of Ukraine, it is an instrument bound to song, memory, identity and resistance.
Its history is inseparable from the kobzars: travelling Ukrainian singers and storytellers who carried epic ballads, Cossack histories, religious songs, laments, famine memory and songs of freedom from place to place. During periods of Russian and Soviet repression, this tradition was treated as more than entertainment. The music preserved language, grief, faith and national feeling, which made the instrument and its players politically dangerous.
Bandura: The Forbidden Instrument brings that history into a live concert setting, not as heritage kept behind glass, but as living music.
Mariia Petrovska is a charismatic bandura player and singer, and one of the rising voices of Ukrainian music. A multi-time winner of all-Ukrainian and international bandurist competitions, she combines command of the instrument with a pure, emotive voice, making traditional Ukrainian music feel immediate, powerful and contemporary. Alongside her traditional repertoire, she also writes her own songs, carrying the bandura forward as a modern concert instrument.
After the Russian invasion, Mariia left Ukraine to live in the UK and is currently studying songwriting and performance at BIMM Manchester. She continues to use music as a voice for Ukraine. She leads the volunteer organisation People’s Territory of Happiness and is a major contributor to the Cultural Forces programme. In summer 2023, she travelled to the east of Ukraine, close to the war zone, where she performed for Ukrainian defenders and appeared in a fundraising video that went viral on YouTube. She has also performed at Eurovision Village in Liverpool, recorded a song for a BBC broadcast about Ukraine, and appeared to great acclaim at London’s Finborough Theatre.
For this one-off Cutting Keys concert, Mariia is joined by Taylor Higgs on grand piano and backing vocals.
Taylor is a Southend-on-Sea pianist, musician and London College of Music alumnus. Cutting Keys is his concert series built around rare, traditional and culturally significant instruments from around the world, placing them beside piano in live collaborations that audiences would not normally have the chance to experience.
His role here is not simple accompaniment. The grand piano becomes the second architecture of the evening: harmony, atmosphere, rhythm, space and response around Mariia’s bandura and vocals. The result is a live fusion between Ukrainian tradition and jazz/classical piano, shaped by the two musicians in the room and created for this performance only.
This is a rare chance to hear the Ukrainian bandura in person, performed by an artist carrying its tradition forward, alongside a grand piano collaboration built especially for Cutting Keys.
A percentage of ticket sales will go towards a Ukrainian charity chosen by Mariia.