![Vasyl Barvinsky [Василь Барвінський]](/upload/thumb/2024/09/wasyl-barwinski_archiwum_auto_1400x800.jpg)
He learned at Lwów’s GTM Conservatoire and the Prague Conservatoire. In 1915–39 he was the head of the Mykola Lysenko Higher Institute of Music in Lwów – Poland’s main Ukrainian music school, where he taught piano classes for twenty-four years. His compositions included Ukrainian Rhapsody for orchestra (1911, broadcast by Polish Radio in 1938) and Piano Concerto in F Minor (1937).
No close contacts between Koffler and Barvinsky are documented before 1939. Under the Soviet occupation, Barvinsky became the head (rector) of LGK Lviv State Conservatoire (1940–41), where Koffler was employed as deputy rector and head of the Chair of Composition. The LGK took over the PTM Conservatoire’s building, where Koffler had worked in 1924–39.
In 1940 Barvinsky was appointed to represent the LGK at the Kyiv Assembly of the Union of Soviet Composers, along with Koffler, Borys Lyatoshynsky, Stanyslav Lyudkevych, Seweryn Barbag, Zofia Lissa, Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern, and Adam Sołtys. Under the German occupation, Barvinsky was, among others, a reviewer of spectacles staged at the German-Ukrainian opera and operetta theatre in Lwów. Initially restored to the post of the LGK director under the second Soviet occupation (1944–47), he was later exiled to the east of Russia, and only returned to Lviv in 1958.