After spending the first phase of the war in Poland, pianist and choir founder Anna Minakova chose to return to her hometown of Kharkiv, where she began reuniting her displaced musical collective.
Today, rehearsals and concerts have once more become part of the city’s fragile cultural rhythm – offering performers and audiences alike moments of concentration, closeness and emotional release amid curfews, air raid alerts and life lived under the constant threat of Russian strikes.
A few minutes from Kharkiv’s opera house and Shevchenko Park, people descend a narrow metal staircase into a basement concert venue hidden beneath the city center. From the outside, there is little to suggest that, only a few dozen miles from the front line, around a hundred people have gathered here for a concert on a late March evening.
Inside, the room is warm, crowded and already pulsing with music and conversation. Colored decorations sway slightly above the stage, while moving projections drift across the back wall. In a city that still lives under the constant threat of Russian strikes, there is an undeniable irony in spending a concert evening underground.
Concert beneath the city
The band performing tonight is called Fever. It is their first concert together. A lead singer with a guitar stands at the center of the stage, flanked by another guitarist, a bassist, a drummer and three backing vocalists in a loose 1970s-inspired style, gently swaying in unison as they sing. Ukrainian lyrics somewhere between soft rock, pop melodies and something more intimate.
Some people sing along from their seats, while others gradually rise to their feet.
At the electric piano sits Anna Minakova.
She often plays with her eyes closed, almost disappearing into the music itself. Blonde dreadlocks streaked with strands of pink fall across her shoulders as her hands move steadily over the keys. Sometimes, barely noticeably, she joins parts of the vocals herself.
The 40-year-old does not command attention in an obvious way. If anything, she seems slightly withdrawn from it. At certain moments, Anna exchanges the piano for a small melodica, played through a thin plastic tube, and briefly pushes the concert into a lighter, almost funkier direction.
For a few hours, the room detaches itself from the world above.
With the final encore and the musicians gradually disappearing backstage, the brief distance the concert created from the reality outside begins to dissolve again.
Jackets are put back on, and some people glance at the time almost instinctively before making their way toward the exit and back up the narrow staircase leading to the street above.
In Kharkiv, evenings tend to end abruptly long before midnight, when the city falls under curfew.
“To accumulate the energy of many people”
Instruments are packed back into their cases while cables are being rolled up, and parts of the decoration are slowly taken down. Anna eventually steps back into the room, looking tired, though not unhappy, as dismantling work continues around her.
Born and raised in the city, Anna graduated from the Kharkiv Conservatory as a pianist before going on to found her own music collective, the hossp choir.
What began years ago as a small gathering of music enthusiasts singing arrangements of Radiohead, Pink Floyd, The Doors and The Beatles gradually evolved into a long-running community that has, over time, involved hundreds of people. Today, around 40 singers from both the main ensemble and a beginners’ group Anna calls the “laboratory” rehearse together regularly, including teachers, people with disabilities, and two men currently serving in the military.
In January, the hossp choir marked its 15th anniversary with two sold-out concerts in Kharkiv.
Anna speaks about all of it carefully, almost cautiously, as though trying not to overstate her own role within something that has long since grown beyond her alone.
“I think this is my main mission,” she says at one point. Then, after pausing briefly to search for the right words, she adds: “To accumulate the energy of many people.”
She pauses often while speaking, sometimes abandoning sentences midway before circling back from another angle. Anna describes herself as an introvert, and unlike many public-facing artists, she rarely seems interested in turning her work into a larger symbolic statement.
Instead, she speaks in practical terms. “People want to have some good in their lives,” she says. “I try to bring the songs that are full of hope, light and maybe even happiness.”
When music suddenly felt senseless
On the choir’s social media pages, old photographs show cramped rehearsals years earlier in small apartments somewhere in Kharkiv’s residential districts – a handful of enthusiasts singing rock and alternative cover songs accompanied by cheap plastic keyboards.
Even then, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the project already seemed to offer something beyond music alone: a space people continued returning to over the years.
Then came Feb. 24, 2022.
“Our last peacetime rehearsal was on Feb. 23,” Anna recalls. “The next day, the war began.” Almost everyone left Kharkiv, including her.
At first, she settled near Gdynia in northern Poland before later moving to Wroclaw.
Like millions of other Ukrainians forced abroad by the invasion, Anna suddenly found herself living between temporary apartments, uncertainty and constant improvisation. During that period, she collaborated with other Ukrainian artists, many also originally from Kharkiv, organizing creative projects and choir activities for children displaced by the war.
At times, she says, the work resembled art therapy, even if nobody formally described it that way. Yet despite continuing to work with music, something fundamental had changed.
“At the very beginning of the war, I felt that everything that I do, like music, was senseless,” she recalls. “Because we just needed to survive.” Even now, more than four years into the war, she does not pretend that this feeling has disappeared entirely.
“I don’t think this feeling of uselessness will ever completely go away,” she admits. “But compared to those first months, when it seemed like my work was completely unnecessary, things have gotten better.”
“Our shared history was continuing”
One of the moments she remembers most vividly came in the summer of 2022, when the ensemble received an invitation to perform at a festival in Bad Neustadt, Germany. By then, its members had been scattered across Europe for months. Many had not seen each other since fleeing Kharkiv.
Five days before the event, they reunited in Wroclaw. “The choir members, suitcases in hand, gathered outside the tiny club,” Anna recalls. “And it was like a dream.” Some cried during the reunion. Others simply stood silently inside the rehearsal room, trying to process the fact that the group still existed at all.
“We realized that our shared history was continuing,” she says. “That we could once again sing together, albeit in new circumstances.”
“And if we live, we should do something that we can do the best.”
As the war dragged on, people slowly began returning to certain parts of their former lives – concerts, exhibitions, rehearsals, small cultural routines that once felt ordinary. Not because life had become easier, Anna says, but because people needed ways to continue living within the reality surrounding them.
Slowly, something in her began to shift as well.
Rebuilding the choir from scratch
“We have a choice to live or to die,” she reflects. “And if we live, we should do something that we can do the best.” For her, that remained music – and eventually, in 2023, it pulled her back to Kharkiv.
“My roots, my home,” Anna says firmly. “It turned out that I am more useful here.” Most of the original choir members, however, remained abroad. Nearly 80 percent of the ensemble had to be rebuilt from scratch.
“We resurrected choir,” she remarks in slightly fractured English, smiling faintly at the wording.
It is already approaching 10 p.m., with a little over an hour left before curfew begins. Anna still carries the tiredness of the evening as she finally heads toward the metro, which will stop running soon as well. Like every night, Kharkiv will soon empty itself almost completely.
The simple joy of making music together
A few days later, still in the city center, men and women gather around a large grand piano inside a bright rehearsal room at the Polytechnic Institute’s Students’ Palace.
The outside world does not disappear, but it momentarily loosens its grip.
Sheet music and lyric pages pass from hand to hand. Some songs are in Ukrainian, others in English. Higher vocal lines rise from one side, lower harmonies from the other, while Anna, seated behind the keys, guides the group almost entirely through small gestures and brief instructions.
Here, away from the stage lights and applause, the quieter mechanics of her work become visible. The people arriving carry different realities with them – exhaustion, displacement, uncertainty, lives gradually reshaped by war.
Yet once the singing begins, much of that briefly recedes behind harmonies, rhythm and the simple joy of making music together. The outside world does not disappear, but it momentarily loosens its grip.
Sustaining a collective like this in wartime Kharkiv requires constant adaptation. Anna describes it as “eternal crisis management.” Electricity can disappear. Internet connections collapse. Air raid alerts interrupt schedules. Plans often change within hours.
“We try to do our best like we did before the war,” she notes. “But in very stressful conditions.”
“The specific strength lies in serving others”
Despite everything, the choir continues meeting regularly, and people keep returning. Anna does not force conversations about war, trauma or healing onto them. She instinctively avoids framing music in overly grand terms.
“They just come to me, and they just want to sing,” she says. “And I give it to them.” Whatever each person ultimately finds there, Anna believes, belongs to them alone. “I don’t decide their specific needs,” she explains. “They take everything they need from me.”
The same reluctance toward grand interpretations surfaces elsewhere as well.
As a woman living through the war, Anna nevertheless resists the idea that women carry a particular kind of strength under such conditions. People are too occupied with survival, she argues, too focused on daily responsibilities to constantly reflect on abstract ideas about gender or resilience.
Still, after sitting with her thoughts for a moment, she slowly finds a way to articulate it.
“The specific strength lies in serving others.” She speaks of it less as a philosophical concept than as a practical reality shaped by necessity – whether in the military, in volunteer work or in a choir rehearsal room. “When there is a task,” Anna observes, “energy is allocated to it.”
A future beyond the logic of war
The same principle, perhaps, defines much of life in Kharkiv now.
Four years ago, she says, people still believed the war might end quickly. That expectation has largely faded. What remains instead is something quieter and more enduring: The desire for some kind of future beyond the logic of war.
“Now we don’t think about it,” she reflects. “But every one of us is hoping that we will still be here to live.”
Like many residents of the city, Anna has developed her own ways of coping with the uncertainty woven into everyday routines. She speaks about yoga and meditation, about trying to create moments of silence amid air raid alerts, exhaustion and the persistent tension that subtly settles into the body.
“My home is my best place,” she says. “Sometimes I just don’t want to go anywhere or open the door to anyone.” Looking inward rather than escaping into external distractions seems, in some ways, central to how she manages it.
Some nights remain especially difficult when strikes land nearby. “The worst sound is an approaching Shahed,” Anna admits – a particularly cruel noise for someone so deeply shaped by music.
Yet most of the time, she tries not to focus on the war more than necessary. “I just try to live as we live, as we can,” she explains. “To notice simple things – birds, trees, skies. To appreciate singing or walking my dog.”
“I want to see the blossom”
Beyond the rehearsal space, sirens still cut through the streets as Russian strikes continue reaching residential neighborhoods. But inside places like this, people still gather several times a week, holding onto small fragments of normality while so much around them remains unresolved.
Anna never describes this as heroism. In fact, she repeatedly minimizes her own role. The idea that she might be giving people hope through music seems to make her slightly uncomfortable.
“I know for sure that if I were not there, people would find their source of joy elsewhere,” she says.
Melodies drift into one another as Anna gives small instructions from behind the piano. Concentration, continuity and shared attention fill the room. She smiles.
“I will live a hundred years. And will be happy,” she says.
The words do not sound naive here. If anything, they feel inseparable from the resilience held inside the music itself. “I want to see the blossom,” she murmurs before her voice disappears back into the harmonies gliding through the air.