This is Irina Maniukina playing her grand piano for the final time before leaving her bomb stricken home near Kyiv. Before playing Chopin’s Étude Op. 25, No. 1, she dusts off the debris scattered over her Steinway & Sons Essex piano.
The beauty of the music she performs is a stark contrast compared with the footage of her home in Bila Tserkva, south of Kyiv. Irina is a 48 year old mother of 2 who is now fleeing the conflict in Ukraine after a bomb landed just 30 feet away from her home. The blast blew all the windows out and left a huge creator in the ground.
Katerina, Irina’s daughter, posted the video to TikTok saying, “After the explosion, everything was smashed and in ashes, I looked around the house and saw that a fire was starting in my brother’s room. I had already called my mother and they rushed as quickly as possible. They couldn’t drive straight to the house. Since the wires just lay on the road. They ran into the house and all together ran to put out the fire. After that, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and my mother decided to gather her thoughts and sit down at the piano.”
The video has already racked up over 2 millions views on the video platform. Many commenters have mentioned the film “The Pianist” and have also noted how fitting that Irina chose to play Chopin, who also decided to flee his home country when the Russians invaded in the 1800s.
Another musician called Andriy Khlyvnyuk left his tour in the USA to return home and fight in Ukraine. He recorded a video singing a Ukrainian folk song called “й у лузі червона калина” which translates to “a red viburnum in the meadow”.
With Andriy’s permission, The Kiffness, a music producer and YouTube personality from South Africa, remixed his passionate performance and the results are magical. The Kiffness upload the song to their YouTube channel sating, “As promised, we agreed that all royalty earnings from this video will be donated to humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian armed forces.”
You can listen to the song on all major streaming platforms by clicking here, you can also buy the song on Bandcamp and profits will be donated to the Ukrainian crisis.
It’s reported that the Andriy, 42 and part of the band band “Boombox”, dropped his children off at their grandmothers house and returned to fight in the war in Ukraine.