Ukrainian sisters lodging in Northumberland turn out to be musical prodigies
Strangers stopped to listen in the street when the windows were open and the girls from refugee family were practising
Dalya Alberge
Sat 29 Apr 2023 12.37 BST
When a Northumberland couple opened up their village home to a Ukrainian mother and her two daughters last year, they were responding to the plight of refugees escaping the Russian invasion. Having been told no more than that this was a musical family, Sheilagh Matheson and Chris Roberts offered two bedrooms and a honky-tonk piano.
Soon they found themselves arranging the loan of a Steinway upright after discovering that these children had an extraordinary musical talent – one that made passersby stop to listen at an open window.
Both girls have now received scholarships to two of the UK’s foremost music schools, less than a year after fleeing their home near Kyiv to start new lives in Corbridge, not far from Newcastle.
Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her 12-year-old sister, Sasha, a violinist, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School near Leatherhead in Surrey.
When Khrystyna played the Chopin Ballade No 1 to me recently, it was as if she was channelling the burdens of a hard life
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Royal Academy of Music
Both feel that classical music helped them to face the trauma of abandoning their home with their mother, Nataliia. They lived in Poland for three months before arriving in Corbridge last June as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
Matheson, a semi-retired broadcast journalist, lives with her husband, a national director of the Skills Funding Agency, in an end-of-terrace five-bedroomed house.
She told the Observer that they themselves are not musical, but that the Ukrainians’ music-making in their home has been “absolutely unbelievable”: “You run out of superlatives. When the windows are open, you see people walking by and they just stand there.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -prodigies