"“I remember the first day my dad brought an upright piano to our apartment,” she said. “'Brought' is very light word for it. We lived on the fourth floor, no elevator, so my dad and my uncle used their man's power to get that super heavy piano in for me.”"
"“It is heartbreaking to not be able to be with my family and my sisters,” she said. “And it is also painful to realize that you don't belong there anymore, and I sort of don't belong here either, but I have my life here now.”"
"“She was so into making the music and not just learning the notes,” Kudielina said of her first teacher. “Every musical piece had a story - a story that we have been creating together.”"
"“This is when I decided to try myself for a musical path,” she said."
A pianist’s musical journey began when her father and uncle carried a heavy upright piano up four flights of stairs to her apartment in Stakhanov, Ukraine. The piano arrived when she was six, and her early training combined discipline with imagination. At eight, a first teacher recognized her talent and encouraged specialized music education for gifted children, but her parents kept her at home due to her young age. Her education intensified anyway, with lessons focused on creating stories behind musical pieces rather than only learning notes. By fifteen, she chose a full musical path, later building a career in the Rogue Valley, earning competition prizes, completing graduate studies, marrying a fellow Ukrainian immigrant, and becoming a mother while managing emotional ties to a homeland she cannot easily return to.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]