The D.C. plane crash took her mom and sister. She turned to her piano.

Washington Post

25-05-2025

Anne Valerie Ter sat on the short black bench in her piano teacher's basement, her mother's warm voice encouraging her as she draped her fingers over the keys to begin Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2.
'Come on, you need to practice more,' she heard her mother, Olesya Taylor, say.
The 14-year-old had spent the previous three months perfecting the piece — every dynamic, each delicate trill and sharp staccato. She planned on performing it at a concerto competition that was about two weeks away, where Taylor and Anne Valerie's younger sister, Olivia Ter, planned to be in the audience, proudly watching.
But they both existed only in her mind that January day.
Olesya Taylor was dead. So was Olivia, 12. Authorities hadn't confirmed it yet, but Anne Valerie knew in her gut that they had not survived the American Eagle Flight 5342 crash with a U.S. Army helicopter near Reagan National Airport the night before.
The symphony of her adolescence — chatty car rides with her mother, the blade on her sister's foot scraping against the ice as she landed a triple toe loop as a budding and talented skater, whispers of secret passcodes to enter bedrooms in the Ter family house — all came to a sharp halt at 8:48 p.m. on Jan. 29.
Anne Valerie pressed her hands into the piano keys, Rachmaninoff watching from a black-and-white portrait on the wall. The hammers lowered in the piano's interior, and sound emanated from the instrument.
But it was lifeless, the chords hollow and deflated. Her typically zealous and full-bodied artistry at the piano bench was absent.
Anne Valerie's teacher, Anna Balakerskaia, later recalled wondering about the competition.
'You'll be able to do this?' she asked Anne Valerie, 'AV' for short.
'I want to do it,' she told her teacher. 'My mom really wanted me to win.'
So they prepared to win.
Many in the classical music world know Sergei Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto as notoriously challenging to play. What's less known is that the composer finished writing the piece in 1901, following a period of deep depression, dedicating it to his therapist as he emerged from darkness back into light.
Andrew Ter, AV's dad, wondered what it would take to bring his daughter back to light. He and his wife, Olesya, met while working together at a small IT consulting company in Northern Virginia shortly after each arrived from Russia in 1998.
They built a life together in Alexandria, Virginia. Now, after the crash, Ter said, he thought of AV and how she would proceed without her mother and sister.
He thought of her life, her next steps — orthodontist appointments and school classes. Then a truly dreadful thought flickered into his mind: Would she ever play piano again?
For AV, the piano was an extension of herself, from the time she first laid eyes on the instrument as a 1-year-old.
Taylor had signed her up for a toddler photo shoot. The photography studio featured a smattering of little props for the children to play with. One was a tiny piano. AV was mesmerized instantly.
'I come up to the piano and I start smacking the keys,' she said.
By 4 years old, she was taking lessons. By 5, she was competing and winning. By 7, she was practicing three to four hours a day and playing with orchestras.
Soon, afternoons were filled with instructors interjecting criticisms about dynamics and phrasing. Evenings were punctuated by drilling melodies and foot-pedaling techniques. Weekends featured trips up Interstate 95 from the family's home in Northern Virginia to train at Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Institute music conservatory.
'Nobody pushed me or anything,' AV said. 'The passion just grew.'
She sparkled with big dreams of performing with the National Symphony Orchestra or headlining Carnegie Hall.
Her musicianship drew the family closer. Taylor, who studied music herself before becoming a health care professional, relished helping her daughter select pieces to play and choose recital outfits.
'She was so into it,' Andrew Ter said.
Olivia grew so accustomed to the sounds of the piano in the home that she couldn't go to bed without them.
'I can't fall asleep without you playing,' she once scolded AV on a night the older sister dared to take off from practicing.
As Olivia grew older, she turned into a friendly competitor as well.
'She watched her older sister being first and being best and making all the achievements and winning awards, and she tried to keep up,' Andrew Ter said. 'She wanted to have a whole shelf full of medals like her older sister.'
In the week after the crash, structure became a religion in the Ter household, a way to keep themselves from swirling in the vortex of all that the tragedy had sucked from their lives.
The plan: keep moving forward.
Andrew Ter tackled a project to cover the basement floor in laminate that had been put off for 15 years. His brother, Nerses, who'd flown in from a part of Ukraine occupied by Russia, pitched in.
AV dived back into her academic classes: AP chemistry, AP U.S. history and AP calculus BC. Though only 14, she was already in 10th grade. School was all online to make more time for piano.
In her mom's absence, a devoted crew of family friends alternated shuttling the teen across the D.C. area and to and from Baltimore on weekends for music classes and tennis.
In her free time, she went to get boba tea with friends and became immersed in long chats on the phone.
Mostly, she kept moving forward.
Evening after evening, she returned to the Steinway in her living room to wrestle with Rachmaninoff's monstrous composition — a minefield of technical challenges and wide-open chords difficult for the average-size hand to reach that is imbued with a majestic yearning.
The chords flowed from AV's fingers, filling the space where her mom would often sit perched on the taupe-colored couch to offer some musical guidance or just share an entertaining Instagram reel. She struck the keys with force, and the sound waves reverberated up toward Olivia's empty room, where unicorn, owl and dinosaur stuffed animals were still tucked in from when she left for skating camp in Wichita.
As the days passed, the tragedy started taking root around AV — in her grandmother's sobs, in preparations for the funeral that would be held in mid-February, in dozens of people filtering through the home bringing meals and condolence cards piling up on the dining room table.
She kept playing.
She dug into the keys and poured out the pain. By the end of that week, four strings inside her piano's frame had snapped.
'It was the first time I ever broke a string,' AV later said. 'Because of how much power I was putting into the piano.'
Competition day fell on a Sunday in early February. The mini performance hall at Levine Music school's Northwest Washington campus buzzed with family members and judges.
Balakerskaia squeezed AV's hand as they sat side by side in the audience waiting to go on.
Two pianos sat in the middle of the stage before a thick red curtain. Balakerskaia assumed her position at the one in the back to play the concerto's orchestrations.
AV took her place at the piano in the front, the pleats in her long black skirt illuminated by the stage lights. Her father sat in the audience and started to record. His hands shook.
She smiled down at the keys, then placed her fingers on the keyboard.
Her fingers glided up and down the piano, articulating every sound in a quick cascade of notes.
The music transitioned into a resounding military-style march. Wide intervals between chords created a grand and sweeping sound. As the dynamics in the sheet music escalated, demanding louder and sharper tones, so did the intensity pulsating through AV.
The tone shifted again, from heavy to delicate. Her fingers fluttered, tickling the high notes.
In the middle of the piece came a twinge of sadness peeking through the harmonies before the music erupted into an even larger and more majestic composition.
AV and Balakerskaia paused, locked eyes and nodded together as they struck a bright chord in unison to launch into the final few segments. Then, a rush of applause as AV smiled at the crowd and politely bowed.
After all the students finished playing, event organizers announced the two grand prize winners: a cellist, Andrew Chi, and a pianist, Anne Valerie Ter.
Andrew Ter cheered, full of emotion. Friends rushed over and encircled AV. For a moment, there was just happiness and light.
Twin white caskets gleamed inside St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Northwest Washington on Feb. 14, Valentine's Day. Olivia was in the left one, Olesya in the right.
Young ice skaters, friends and family members dressed in black crowded into the narrow church, where slivers of light streamed in through tall, thin windows. A small group of men in white robes performed rituals, clanging bells and passing candles as the church choir sang.
Andrew Ter and Olga Kostygova, AV's grandmother, approached the caskets. AV, donning a thin gray headscarf, hung back for as long as she could, initially unwilling to approach.
The time came for a procession of mourners to march through the space between the coffins before they were taken to the burial site.
She moved forward in the line, her dad watching her. She took her place between the caskets as the church choir's soft requiem floated down from the second floor.
As AV confronted the display of pink roses over her little sister's casket, her body caved into itself and she briefly sank as if punched in the stomach.
Her sweet sister. A whirlwind of energy and silliness. A confidante and a comfort. A best friend. Gone.
Her gentle mother. Her biggest cheerleader and strongest advocate. A model of resilience, kindness and generosity. Gone, too.
AV exhaled and sank her head into the bed of pale white flowers on top of her mom's casket.
A tiny sob. Pianissimo.
The next month brought her first-ever school dance.
A family friend, Lolita Gegeshidze, 12, did her hair for the occasion.
'Trust the process,' Lolita said as steam billowed from the giraffe-print hair straightener in her bedroom in Highland, Maryland, as SZA, Mitski and other popular artists played from a cellphone speaker.
While Lolita beautified AV, the girls snacked on a family-size bag of sour gummy candy, chatted about internet gossip tangentially related to the Kardashians and squealed with laughter as the conversation meandered.
'Do you know what an occipital lobe is?' Lolita asked AV out of nowhere.
'I could not tell you,' AV responded. 'I could start yapping about math, though.'
They debriefed about the concerto competition. Lolita wasn't there, but she saw a short TikTok video of it that had amassed 1.6 million views. She was in awe of her friend's talent.
'The only thing I can play on piano is like Christmas songs,' Lolita said, curling the ends of AV's long brown locks with a flourish.
Olivia would normally be the one doing AV's hair, probably adorning it with clips and her wrists and neck with jewelry for the dance.
'She liked everything kind of fancy,' AV said, giggling, her silver braces interlaced with bright blue rubber bands. 'She would make it so extra.'
Soon after, the piano tuner came to the Ter home. AV had broken three more strings.
Chopin and Tchaikovsky traded places with Rachmaninoff in her brain, offering welcome distractions.
A week after the dance, she paced anxiously around a practice room at the Levine campus.
Brian Ganz, an award-winning pianist who had played with orchestras across the world, was teaching a master class that night, and AV was performing for him for some feedback.
Ganz stopped by Levine's small venue around 7 p.m. He absorbed AV's performance as she played Chopin's Ballade No. 3.
'Your playing is very beautiful,' Ganz told AV after she finished her piece. 'There's such tenderness. There's such love in your playing.'
But he was there to help her improve, so he scanned the sheet music for disparities between the marks on the page and the sounds AV was creating with the instrument. She started the piece a second time.
As Ganz peered down at her through thick glasses perched on the middle of his nose, the problem came to him. He stopped her.
'He follows this with a rest,' Ganz said of Chopin, pointing at the sheet music with the eraser on his pencil. 'I think you want to really observe that. Allow that interesting absence of an arrival [of notes] to be heard rather than to pedal through.'
She nodded and played several more phrases. He stopped her again.
'What do we have there?' Ganz asked, referencing a symbol on the page. 'We have a 32nd rest, right? Make that audible.'
AV had gotten used to filling the silent, empty spaces in her life since the crash. The activities, practice sessions and lessons were a comfort. It was impossible to know what might collect in the moments of rest. And she didn't want to find out.
But Ganz offered a counterpoint.
'Let us hear that rest,' he said, smiling. 'The silences are where most of the music takes place.'
The family tackled a new milestone in April: their first big trip since the crash. The Ters went to Florida every year, but never without Olesya and Olivia.
As AV, her dad and her uncle traveled down the coast, they sang along to songs in the car and stopped at a McDonald's drive-through, they later recounted.
The dissonance between old and new life started transforming into a kind of harmony.
At South Beach in the Miami area, AV stood in the ocean water, wiggled her toes in the sand and pointed her face toward the sun.
In an alternate universe, her mom and sister would have been floating on either side of her, she said.
This moment was different. It was quieter. Olivia's giggles were replaced by a seagull cawing. Instead of Olesya's voice, there was the gentle sound of waves lapping onto the shore. The sunlight warmed her skin. For a moment, there was peace. Even without them.