24 March] 1777) was a composer of secular and liturgical music, and a conductor and opera singer, who worked at the Saint Petersburg Court Chapel in the Russian Empire, but who also spent much of his career in Italy.

In 1758, he was accepted as a singer into the capella at Oranienbaum, before being employed at the imperial court of Catherine II in Saint Petersburg, where he received lessons from the Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi.

The earliest writers to produce short biographies of Berezovsky were the German historiographer Jacob von Stehlin [ru], the antiquary and book collector Eugene Bolkhovitinov, and the Russian poet and translator Nikolai Dmitrievich Gorchakov.

[7] Berezovsky's place of birth, father's name, and supposed period as a scholar at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, are known only from verbal accounts, and so are not known for certain.

[13] During the 18th century, as choirs arose in Ukrainian churches, monasteries and schools, composers and singers raised choral music to a high artistic and professional level.

Ukraine became known as a place to recruit boys with excellent singing voices, and from the 1730s, Russian nobles brought talented youngsters from the region with them to perform at the Capella.

[15] From 1738, the Hlukhiv Singing School [ru] was used by the Capella to provide boys with their initial training, before those that were selected were coached as singers at the court in Saint Petersburg.

[18] His name does not appear in surviving documents of this institution, but as it was the only one in the Russian Empire that trained singers for the Imperial Court Choir, it is likely that he was educated there,[7] as were other composers such as Artemy Vedel, Hryhorii Skovoroda, and Gavrilo Rachinsky [uk].

[8] He no longer sang as a principal after Catherine II became empress in 1762, perhaps because of his age, or because Russian musicians lost favour at court during her rule.

An imperial document exists concerning two passports issued on 26 August 1764 to persons from Little Russia sent to Italy at the private expense of Kirill Razumovsky, the last Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host.

The passport document read: "In Little Russia to Kyiv to the Little Russian nobleman Maxim Berezevsky and the merchant Ivan Konstantinov, sent by His Eminence Hetman Count Razumovsky to Italy".

[6] His sacred choral concerts was performed in August 1766 in the Amber Room of the Tsarskoye Selo Palace in the presence of Catherine II.

The letter was sent to Martini in February 1770 by the director of the Russian imperial theatres, Ivan Yelagin, by which time Berezovsky was already in Bologna and had begun classes.

[12] Academicians gathered to test the applicants, who assessed the candidates' examination pieces by secret ballot, using white and black balls to vote that the required standard had been reached.

[6] The Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin invited him to work as the director of a music academy in Kremenchuk (now in modern Ukraine),[20] but on 24 March (2 April N.S.)

[28] His suicide, taken as fact from the early 19th century, may have happened because of debt problems, as opposed to earlier theories such as his supposed poor treatment by the imperial court.

[8] His most well-known choral works are the concerto "Ne otverzhi mene vo vremya starosti" ("Do Not Forsake Me in My Old Age"),[43] considered by musicologists to be his last composition,[29] liturgical music for the Lord's Prayer and the Credo, and four communion hymns: "Chashu spaseniia" ("Chalice of Salvation"), "V pamiat' vichnuiu" ("In Eternal Memory"), "Tvoriai anhely svoia" ("Let the Angels Create"), and "Vo vsiu zemliu" ("Over All the Land").

[8] Berezovsky was one of the creators of the Ukrainian choral style in sacred music, and the first composer to divide the Orthodox Liturgy into seven parts,[13][43] providing each of them with a distinctive role.

[45] Berezovsky's opera Demofonte was commissioned and paid for by the Russian statesman Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov, who was stationed with his squadron in Livorno.

[29] Four arias, discovered in a music library in Florence, have survived: Mentre il cor con meste voci, Misero pargoletto, Per lei fra l'armi, and Prudente mi chiedi.

Timanthes' arias, Misero pargoletto and Prudente mi chiedi?, contain da capo sections in the style of Niccolò Jommelli.

[49] The piece consists of three movements:[49] The manuscript score, along with many other culturally important documents and objects, was taken by Napoleon Bonaparte's army to Paris.

[42] The manuscript of the sonata was obtained from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (code D 11688),[50][49] and published in Kyiv by the Ukrainian composer Mykhailo Stepanenko.

[28] Its first performance, with Stepanenko accompanying the violinist Alexander Panov, took place on 26 May 1981 at the Kyiv Conservatory (now the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music).

[53] The attribution to Berezovsky was confirmed by Shulgina and experts at the National Library of Poland, who analysed the handwriting and demonstrated that the sonatas were written out by one person.

A comparison of the sonatas with Berezovsky's surviving autograph of the antiphon he wrote as an examination piece in 1771 shows that manuscript was written by a copyist.

[54] In 2014, the works were reattributed as being of Czech origin, when the composers were identified as being Kauchlitz Colizzi, Johann Baptist Wanhal, and probably the clarinettist Joseph Beer.

Fox found a manuscript of the score in the music collection of an Italian aristocratic family, and was given permission for the work to be performed.

His surname may have been written differently because of errors in transcribing the handwritten transcription of his name from the Russian, which would not have been easy for the West Europeans to read.

The documents, originally from the Library of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin,[64] had been taken to Kyiv by the Red Army after World War II, the most important finds (about a fifth) going to Moscow.