Piano lessons sometimes carry more than music between teacher and student. In the case of Baylor University senior piano lecturer Bradley Bolen and gifted 11-year-old Ukrainian pianist Myron Maletskyi, online lessons provided a bridge over which compassion and sympathy could travel in time of war.
The two met in 2019 when Bolen was taking part in a Gloria Artis International Music Association competition in Vienna, Austria, and Myron was a 9-year-old from Odesa turning heads in a master class with a precocious virtuosity.
“He was so young and so talented,” Bolen said.
Bolen, who has taught piano overseas in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon through the nonprofit American Voices, kept in touch with Myron and his mother, Iryna Maletska, over the years. In February, as a Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed imminent, Bolen checked in to see how Myron, his two brothers and their parents were faring.
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Barricades were going up as Odesa braced for attack with the city’s daily life starting to change. Myron’s 14-year-old brother, training for a professional soccer career, saw that put on hold indefinitely. And Myron could not make his regular piano lessons.
Bolen said piano students he worked with in Iraq had seen the fighting essentially shelve their education several years. And after two years of COVID-19 disruptions, he had experience teaching piano online.
The Baylor professor asked if Myron could continue his practices with him coaching online through Zoom videoconferencing. It could help keep his skills sharp and might provide a welcome distraction.
Iryna readily agreed and for four sessions through March and April, the Ukrainian pupil and the American piano coach worked on a Beethoven sonata and Moszkowski etudes. During that time, the Maletskyis navigated a move from their threatened urban hometown to a village in neighboring Moldova where a close friend’s grandfather lived, then to their current stop, an older house in the northern German village of Leese.
In a recent Zoom interview with Bolen, Iryna and Myron shared their experience and current situation. Myron let his mother do most of the talking in the interview in English, but his nimble fingers spoke for him in two short pieces played for the camera.
Myron started piano lessons only six years ago, said Iryna, who plays the violin. His first public performance came three months later and his parents realized they had a talented child. Odesa has a rich cultural history. The Maletskyis’ apartment is located in Odesa’s central historic district, where its ornate 19th century opera and ballet house is located.
The Ukrainian pianist demonstrated a remarkable ability in the two pieces he performed for the Zoom interview. An adaptation of the Ukrainian folk song “Nese Galya Vodu,” which translates to “Halya Carries Water,” found Myron progressing from soulful interpretation to light jazz.
“I like playing jazz,” he said with a smile afterward.
And the Moszkowski Etude Op. 72 No. 2 showed a brisk, nimble fluidity.
The 11-year-old’s talent may have brought his family to their current location. He played two concerts in Germany last October and contacts made at that time opened the door to relocation to Germany, Iryna said.
Myron now is back to in-person lessons in the local secondary school preparing students for university studies, and practicing some two hours a day. He is not alone as about 30 other Ukrainian youth are students at the school.
Iryna is studying, too. Though she speaks Ukrainian, Russian and English with fluency, her German is not as strong, and she is taking German lessons three times weekly. In the village of Leese, life is largely conducted in German, she said, noting that in Ukraine, English lessons start in the primary grades.
The internet has broadened the reach of Myron’s music, with recent videos posted on his mother’s YouTube channel. There is his performance of the Ukrainian national anthem “Glory to Ukraine,” video greetings to a Baylor University panel on the Ukraine-Russia war and an etude passage in support of Doctors Without Borders.
Iryna said she keeps daily contact with friends and family in Odesa — so far the family’s apartment is undamaged — and to a lesser extent with friends in Switzerland, the United States, Poland, Italy and Portugal. Her soccer-playing son hopes to hear this week whether he can continue training in Germany and her husband, who works in finance, checks regularly on returning. Myron turns 12 in July, but it is uncertain whether that birthday will be celebrated away from his home country.
Nobody knows what the future will hold, she said.
Myron intends to pursue a career in piano performance and has told his mother he would like to be the first Ukrainian to win the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition.
“I told him he needs to be practicing six hours a day for that,” she said.
As for her six-year-old, music may be in his future, but in a different way.
“He will be on Broadway,” the mother said with a laugh. “He’s always singing.”
Bolen hopes a time comes where his path might physically cross that of the Maletskyis again, perhaps if he returns to Poland, where he had visited regularly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Poland is the home country of recent Baylor master’s graduate Cezary Karwowski, who came to the United States to study under Bolen after meeting him in 2019 at the same Vienna festival where the Baylor senior lecturer met Myron.
Closing the interview, Iryna asked readers and viewers not to let Ukraine slide from their attention.
“The story about Ukraine … should be the first news all over the world,” she said. The story needs to stand in contrast to the propaganda justifying the Russian invasion and told to Russia’s more than 140 million people. “This is a problem for all the world,” she said.