Evgeny Grinko

Zhukovsky, drums, and three bands ending at once

Grinko grew up in Zhukovsky, a town outside Moscow, and arrived at music without conservatoire training. He started in punk bands at around seventeen, moved to drums in more experimental groups, and eventually met Anton Krivulya, with whom he formed Solntsetsvety. The band made several studio albums and toured Russia on improvisation; one record was cut on the day the Georgia war broke out in 2008. Through a promoter who had passed their music on, Damo Suzuki of Can came to Russia and performed with them in Moscow, St Petersburg, Pskov and Minsk.

That period ended abruptly. Grinko has described three bands dissolving at more or less the same time in 2009 and 2010, and the rhythmic straitjacket of the group work — either hypnotically repetitive or deliberately chaotic — as something he had grown tired of pushing against. What he wrote next was neither: a short, plainly melodic piano piece that he thought sounded too much like Yann Tiersen to be worth releasing. Krivulya talked him into putting it out.

A waltz that travelled south

"Valse" sat online for months with modest traffic before the numbers moved, and they moved from an unexpected direction: Azerbaijan first, then Turkey. Grinko has said the geography of his audience was a surprise to him — the channel's views were overwhelmingly Turkish, and the concert offers that followed came from Ankara and Istanbul rather than Moscow. He was selling out Turkish halls while remaining, in Russia, a minor figure from the improvised-music underground.

He has never been especially reverent about the category he landed in. Asked about neoclassical music in a Russian interview, he called it simple, "almost like Relax radio" — a flat assessment of a genre that tends to be described in far grander terms by the people who sell it.

The records, and the way they get made

The album "Ice for Aureliano Buendia" was mastered at Abbey Road after Grinko was unhappy with what Russian studios returned. A 2011 EP, "Winter Sunshine", set the seasonal template he would return to more than a decade later. The working method has stayed unsystematic: he improvises at the piano until the notes feel right, records multiple takes, then assembles the keeper from the best fragments, adding strings, accordion and electronic detail as the piece suggests them.

He names Philip Glass, Erik Satie and Simeon ten Holt as the minimalists who matter to him, but resists the idea that restraint is a rule. His phrasing is that the decision is not about less or more, it is about what feels right. The ambitions can be considerably less tasteful than the finished records suggest: for one piece he wanted to record twenty or thirty coffin lids slamming shut at once, and both his label and his engineer declined to help him do it.

Winter Moonlight

"Winter Moonlight" arrived on 7 February 2025 through Nettwerk, ten tracks of piano and strings that reviewers received as a deliberately peaceful record rather than a demonstrative one. The opener "Glare of Us" was read as a serenade laid over a love song; "Melting" shifts tempo in gusts; "Mr. Squirrel" supplies the mischief that keeps the melancholy from settling; "Agatha's Letter" carries the weight. One piece is built on notes found inside an accordion bought at a flea market.

The album is also a document of relocation. Grinko is now based in Istanbul, and the record was heard as connecting that life, and time in Berlin, back to a Russian childhood. The video for "Murmuration" was filmed in Istanbul's sixth-century Basilica Cistern, which makes the point about where he has ended up more efficiently than any press release.

It followed his first Berlin concert, at the Passionskirche on 27 June 2024, which he credited as the reason a European run became possible at all. The tour that supported the album opened on 3 March 2025 at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berliner Philharmonie and reached St John at Hackney in London on 5 March, billed as an intimate evening of new material, older pieces and what he called a few mischievous surprises.

2026: Turkey, twice

The 2026 Turkish run was announced on 12 January and opened on 10 March at Çorlu's Ünal Baysan Kültür Merkezi, followed by Bostancı Gösteri Merkezi in Istanbul on 11 March, the Lütfi Kırdar International Congress and Exhibition Centre on 13 March, Kayseri's Kadir Has Gösteri ve Sanat Merkezi on 15 March and Sivas on 16 March, with tickets sold through Bubilet. The Lütfi Kırdar date was his first at that hall; he greeted the audience in Turkish and played the folk song "Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım" on the piano, and reports of the evening dwelt as much on his attempts at the language as on the programme.

Turkish press covering the Istanbul night on 14 March described it as the season's closer, with Grinko intending to spend the months to autumn in the studio on new material. That plan has since been folded around another Turkish run rather than replaced by one: six dates between 29 September and 5 October 2026, starting at the İzmir Açıkhava Tiyatrosu, then Bursa's Merinos AKKM Osmangazi Salonu on 30 September, Congresium in Ankara on 2 October, and three Istanbul nights — Habitat Hilltown on 3 October, the Yahya Kemal Beyatlı Gösteri Merkezi on 4 October and the Leyla Gencer Opera ve Sanat Merkezi on 5 October. After that he is listed for the Most Wanted: Music Club Festival in Berlin on 4 and 5 November.

On stage

The show has not been rebuilt into a spectacle to match the streaming numbers. It remains a seated concert of piano and small string ensemble, drawing on "Winter Moonlight" and the back catalogue, with "Valse" still doing the work it has done since 2010. Turkish venues on the autumn run range from an open-air amphitheatre in İzmir to an opera and arts centre in Bakırköy, which means the same programme has to survive both night air and a dry, upholstered room.

What audiences report back is consistent rather than ecstatic in the usual sense: attendees describe evenings pitched at stillness, and recommend it specifically to people who care about the piano. The Turkish-language material — the greeting, the folk tune — is not a fixed part of the set, but it has become the moment most often written up.