March 22, 2022 in Kharkiv, Denys Karachevtsev
Around him, on Victory Square in Kharkiv, the buildings are gutted and the streets deserted. Alone in the middle of the ruins, the Ukrainian Denys Karachevtsev performs the prelude to the Suite No. 5 for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. Seen hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, this video is not the only one posted by this professional cellist. “I am launching my project in the streets of Kharkiv to raise funds for humanitarian aid and the restoration of the city’s architecture, he explained in one of his videos. Let’s unite to revive our city together! »
March 6, 2022 in Kharkiv, Vera Lytovchenko
What we do in bomb shelters when they bomb us from the sky https://t.co/SzielSRxIj
Shortly before Denys Karachevtsev, it was the violinist Vera Lytovchenko, a refugee in the basements of Ukraine’s second city, who played for her fellow citizens by posting a video on social networks. Very attached to her city – she is a college music teacher and a soloist in the opera orchestra – she chose to perform a Ukrainian folk song by composer Mykola Lysenko: “To make people forget the war for a few minutes. »
In July 2021 in Durban, Jenny Bowes
At the start of the summer of 2021, South Africa was experiencing a wave of riots and violence following the imprisonment of Jacob Zuma, who presided over the country from 2009 to 2018. In Durban, a city hard hit by events, a piano teacher, Jenny Bowes, found an abandoned instrument in the middle of a crossroads. She sat down at the keyboard and started playing. Her rendition of the South African national anthem, filmed by her brother, quickly went viral.
In August 2020 in Beirut, May Melki
The day after the explosion in the port of Beirut which devastated the city on August 4, May Melki sits down in front of her piano, intact, and puts her fingers on the keys. In her destroyed living room, filmed by her granddaughter, she interprets Auld Lang Syne (“it’s only a goodbye”) and several pieces of Arabic music. The emotion aroused by this video has led to a surge of solidarity from many musicians around the world, some of whom have launched fundraising campaigns to help the victims.
In 2014 in Damascus, Aeham Ahmad
Now known as “the Pianist of Yarmouk” (his nickname and the title of his autobiography, published in La Découverte in 2018), the musician Aeham Ahmad, now 34, now lives in Europe, far from the Yarmouk district , in Damascus, where he grew up and gave street concerts, in the middle of the ruins, at the beginning of the war in Syria. His piano, which he moved through the streets with the help of a trailer, was destroyed by Daesh in the spring of 2015.