Tatiana Viljan was born in 1978 in a small fishing village north of Haapsalu in Estonia. Her mother worked as a teacher to support her and her older brother Boris - their father having disappeared not long after Tatiana's birth. Their parents did not have a particularly troublesome marriage - Saldvi simply did not return home from the processing plant one evening. Local law enforcement were never able to track him down. Tatiana was eight when the family moved to Paide and the new man in her mother's life. Lud Gaarve was everything she and Boris could ever want of a father and they became a close family.
Her mother soon noticed that Tatiana had an ear for music and bought her her first instrument (a wooden whistle) at the age of three. She encouraged the growing talent as best she could. It wasn't long before she caught the attention of the authorities who could spot a potential child prodigy. She began her studies at Tallinn conservatory the same year Estonia became independent (again) of the USSR. It was there she met two people of great significance in her life.
Arvo Part had studied at the same conservatory in his younger days. He was impressed by the freshness of her talent and allowed her attend his master classes from time to time. Aleksander Gorevitch was a teaching assistant. His family had moved to Estonia during the years of the USSR but were now under pressure to return to their homeland in Russia. Aleks found many things worth staying for in Tallinn, not the least of which was Tatiana. They married on her seventeenth birthday.
Her musical career flourished with placements in youth orchestras and many competitions. It wasn't without pressure and though Aleks was there to help through some of it, she still felt the need to let off a little steam once in a while...
She liked to drive - and drive fast. At the start she kept off public roads but bit by bit she felt the need for speed there too. Naturally there were many speeding tickets and warnings but her stepfather usually managed to intervene before legal proceedings began. He was involved with the Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party) from its inception in 1991 when the Republic reformed. He had some influence around Tallinn and could usually get her out of trouble until a near miss with a police car at nineteen sent her skidding off the road. Her licence was immediately revoked and her arm and leg broken.
Her injuries healed perfectly well but she always felt her arm was never quite right when sitting in front of a piano - that it kept her at being merely 'very good indeed' and stopped her transcending to the level of genius. Aleks meanwhile was still under pressure to return to St Petersburg to aid in his family's attempts to build a business - not that they could ever properly explain what the business did - 'imports and diplomatic negotiation management' they said. Feeling Tatiana needed a change of scenery to get over the accident (and hopefully cease the reckless behaviour), he brought her to St Petersburg and arranged an audition at the Shostakovitch Philharmonic Hall. It all went exactly to plan. For about six months.
Tatiana Gorevitch became a household name in the Baltic region - amongst the frequent concert going households! She acquired a new driving licence for her new home and was even sticking to the speed limits... for a while. Aleks found himself becoming more and more busy with his brothers and the business and disinclined to get his wife involved. Both found their respective careers taking them on the road more often. Tatiana got lucky on her first run-in for speeding - the officer happened to be a music lover and let it go. When Aleks found out about it quite by accident some time later, he was furious to discover her back to her old habits and him knowing nothing of it. It marked the end of their marriage as their lives drifted apart. The divorce was far from acrimonious as they both realised it was for the best. As a final vow to him, Tatiana promised to keep her speeding off the public roadways.
She kept to her word. Russia being a rather expansive country, it wasn't too difficult to find unpopulated places whilst touring with the symphony orchestra. The obssession with speed only grew until one day she met some fellow speed junkies in isolated parts who suggested to her the openness of the skies... she took to it naturally and became every bit as good (and lethal) a pilot as she was a driver. Indeed she got work from time to time as a test pilot.
In 2007 she was flying a beta test model for a Russian interest. Hard to know what went wrong - if the engine just failed, if a bird or something hit the craft... wasn't much left of the plane to find out. While there was an ejector seat on the plane, didn't seem possible that at that speed and that height there could be much hope.
At the time, Tatiana's first priority was surviving the thin atmosphere and the fall - how she did it was pretty irrelevant. At the time. It was something of a shock to wake up in the medical facility to news of how she herself had flown from the crumbling craft to safety. Tatiana Gorevitch disappeared from the concert scene for a while - which caused Aleks to re-emerge. They had once promised to meet every year on their anniversary for dinner but in 2004 her attempts to reach him failed. In 2008 he caught up with her again. One might think after four years they'd have a lot more to talk about but neither seemed to have that much to say. Still, she couldn't hide her eruption from him for very long so having decided she had difficulty adjusting and this was causing the lapse in her career (he wasn't entirely wrong), he stuck around long enough to encourage her back to the concert hall. Never seemed quite comfortable though and strongly recommended she remain independent as a Nova.
The last year has seen Tatiana's career getting back on track and contact with Aleks has once more diminished to the odd phonecall.