DakhaBrakha brings Ptakh to the Mahaiwe on Jan. 30

Kyiv's world-music quartet, touring their first album in five years, plays Great Barrington's 700-seat Mahaiwe on Saturday, Jan. 30.

This month DakhaBrakha finished a run of home-country shows that ended with three nights in Kyiv, every hryvnia of the box office pledged to Ukraine's defense forces. In January the quartet comes to Castle Street. DakhaBrakha plays the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2027, at 8 p.m.

The date was announced Oct. 14 and is listed on Ticketmaster's DakhaBrakha page. The Mahaiwe's own events calendar is where to buy; the theater is at 14 Castle Street, and with only about 700 seats, a Saturday night by a band this well-loved won't sit around for long. Skip the resale sites and go to the box office.

The Berkshires show sits in a tight New England weekend. The band's January listings have them at the Somerville Theatre outside Boston the night before.

What they're bringing is Ptakh, which means "bird." The Kyiv Post calls it DakhaBrakha's first album in five years: 14 compositions written at different times, most of them recorded in Kyiv in 2025. The band toured it at home this fall, from Bila Tserkva on Sept. 30 through those three closing nights at Kyiv's October Palace on Oct. 16, 17 and 18, donating all of the revenue from the Ukrainian concerts to the country's defense forces. A European run presenting the album follows in November, with dates such as Mannheim's Alte Feuerwache on Nov. 22, before the band crosses to North America.

A Saturday night in Great Barrington, with a band that just played three nights in Kyiv for its country's defense.

If you've never seen them, DakhaBrakha describe themselves on their own site as a world-music quartet from Kyiv. That undersells it a little. The band draws on Ukrainian folk song and arranges it with instruments and rhythms from far outside it, and the result is a live show that can turn a seated theater into something closer to a ritual. Our listing tags it as rock; that's not quite right either, but it does get at the volume.

The Mahaiwe is the right room for it. A restored 1905 theater with about 700 seats, it's intimate enough that the harmonies land without a mic doing all the work.

A cold January Saturday on Castle Street, dinner in town, then a band from Kyiv singing songs older than the building. That's a good night in Great Barrington.

Sources: Ticketmaster: DakhaBrakha tour dates (ticketmaster.ca); Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center: Events (mahaiwe.org); Kyiv Post: DakhaBrakha Ptakh album and Ukrainian tour (kyivpost.com); DakhaBrakha: About (dakhabrakha.com.ua); Regioactive: DakhaBrakha European tour presenting the new album Ptakh, Mannheim (regioactive.de); Wikipedia: DakhaBrakha (en.wikipedia.org); Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center - Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)