The fundamentals of the repertoire for bayan and accordion performers around the world are the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Classical music concerts and virtually all international competitions cannot do without performing Bach’s music.
I first encountered the music of this great composer when I was five years old, and as soon as I held a bayan in my hands, I tried to play Bach’s pieces. At first, these were excerpts from simple inventions, then attempts to perform works written by Bach for the organ. But my greatest interest has always been The Well-Tempered Clavier. I have dedicated several years of my life to studying this cycle of Preludes and Fugues. I have prepared sheet music material—a transcription of both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier for bayan.
The interest in this work lies in the fact that performing the music on the bayan, an instrument with bellows that allows for crescendo and diminuendo, fundamentally differs from performing Bach’s music on the organ, for example. It is also impossible to directly apply the principles of piano performance to the bayan. The principle of the grand piano keyboard is the hammer striking the string, while on the bayan, it is air that vibrates the metal reed—the voice.
Therefore, I believe that performing Bach’s music on the bayan requires an entirely different approach, which I have attempted to reflect in my transcriptions of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
This recording is my first step in capturing this extensive work in sound. I set myself the task of shaping listeners’ perceptions so that it feels as if Bach actually composed these works specifically for the bayan, allowing his music to sound organic and natural on this instrument.
I hope this recording will find like-minded enthusiasts.
With deep respect for my listeners,
Yuri Medianik
The conductor and multi-instrumentalist (violin, accordion, bandoneon) Yuri Medianik is the founder of several ensembles and regularly performs as both a performer and producer of major classical music projects. He is Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Tyumen Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he has organized several major festivals dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Mikhail Glinka and Aram Khachaturian over the past few years. He is also Artistic Director of the Summer in the Tobolsk Kremlin Festival and the Bogdanian Chamber Music Festival.
The musician’s studio work includes the first-ever recording of three sonatas for viola da gamba and clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach arranged for cello and bayan, in a duet with Boris Andrianov; an album of arrangements for piano and bayan, in a duet with Eduard Kunz; the single La Campanella; and a CD of works for bayan by Vyacheslav Semyonov.
In recent years, Yuri Medianik has realized several major conducting projects with the Tyumen Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2024, he has been working with the Naxos record company. For one of its labels, recordings of works for cello and orchestra by Mieczysław Weinberg and Antonín Dvořák were made together with cellist Nikolai Shugaev and released in May 2025. The first professional recording of the author’s version of Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 Bogatyrskaya was made for Radio Orpheus and has already been broadcast.
Yuri Medianik’s interests also extend to film music and crossover projects. In 2007, he founded the Emotion Orchestra, in which he performs as a bayan player, as well as the Pluri Art Orchestra, an ensemble with which he regularly collaborates in the film industry. Notably, the orchestra and its conductor were nominated for the Russian National Music Award “Victoria” for the soundtrack of the film Ice-2.
Yuri Medianik is also well known to Russian television audiences. Since 2017, he has been the chief conductor of the All-Russian television talent competition Blue Bird on the Russia-1 channel. Since the same year, he has served as an ambassador for the charity foundation Be Human.
Yuri Medianik was born in 1983 in the Donetsk region. He graduated from the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory as an assistant trainee specializing in violin under Professor Ara Bogdanian; from the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music specializing in bayan under Professor Vyacheslav Semyonov; and completed postgraduate studies in opera and symphonic conducting at the Ippolitov-Ivanov State Music and Pedagogical Institute under Professor Yuri Simonov.
He is a Grand Prix laureate of the Demidov International Youth Violin Competition (DeMUX) in Yekaterinburg, the Vogtland Music Days International Bayan Competition in Klingenthal, Germany, and the Moscow International Competition of Accordionists and Bayan Players (2000). He also received gold medals at international competitions in Berlin and New York in 2019.
