She has been to more places around the world than the average high school student, and the awards for her accordion playing are piling up.
Meet Maria Telesheva, who will be entering her senior year this fall at North Eugene High School, but before then, she and her father, Sergei Teleshev, will perform this summer as Duo Two Accordions at various local venues and nationally: July 3 at the City of Portland Celebration, July 17 through 19 at the Accordion Teacher’s Guild International Festival in Chicago and August 16 through 18 at the Cotati Accordion Festival in Cotati, California.
Maria Telesheva will be busy.
“Me and my dad want to make the accordion great again,” she says. “I want people to see the beauty of this instrument.”
She can play. Telesheva was six years old when she started to play the accordion. Her teacher is her father, a native of Ukraine who settled in the U.S. in 2000 and who is an accomplished accordion player in his own right. Telesheva has won accordion and vocal international competitions in the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, Belarus and Ukraine. She’s also a talented singer who in November 2021 was selected “Prodigy of the Year” and graced the cover of Accordion Stars Illustrated Magazine.
“We play music in many different styles, including classical, tango, waltz, jazz, rock, original, pop, folk, world music and more,” she notes.
In December 2024, Telesheva was one of 21 teen musicians selected to receive a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award from the national platform From the Top, the largest platform in the U.S. for young classically trained musicians, which aims to make elite training accessible to those with the talent, but not the means, to pursue it. Each musician received a grant of up to $10,000. Telesheva was featured in From the Top’s long-running NPR broadcast.
She also got the full $10,000 — “It was almost like an early Christmas gift,” she says — and she and her father decided to go big and buy a 22-pound accordion from the famed Victoria Accordions company in Italy. It would, she reasoned, be a lighter load on stage to perform with and sing. She had been using a 40-pound accordion.
Now if only the accordion would arrive. It has been stuck in customs, she says, and she adds, “We might even need to change the company we’re buying from.”
Still, Telesheva has lighter accordions at her disposal, and she is set for a summer of performing and competing.
After that is her senior year of high school, then college. Telesheva says it’s likely that she will attend the University of Oregon and major in business, but that music and the accordion won’t be far behind.
“I really do love music,” she says. “I definitely want to have music in my life.”