Year 13 student's music trip to Hungary
Ziko R in Year 13 reports:
The Crescendo Summer Institute was quite easily the most unexpected experience and also one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. Based in Tokaj, Hungary, the course lasted two weeks and consisted of mostly children aged 17 and 18 who played all kinds of instruments to an extremely high standard. This environment I was around seriously humbled me to a great extent, but also greatly inspired me as it was an atmosphere I’ve never been around before, so many kids my age all on the same wavelength, all with the same passion and talent for music.
Whilst there, we were assigned teachers for our chosen course. With my course being the piano, my teacher was Florian Mitrea, a concert pianist who is a resident teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Florian was an exceptional pianist, demonstrating his skills in one of the many concerts presented in Hungary to the students, as well as being an extremely friendly and informative teacher. Throughout the two weeks, I certainly feel like he made a massive difference to my approach toward music and how I play.
As well as this, we were allocated a secondary course on top of our main course. Having no idea about jazz, and having never played it at all, it only seemed right that this was the right course for me. And what a great decision that was. I wasn’t the only person there without jazz experience, and we were all placed into a band lead by Douglas Walter, our jazz teacher. We played from jazz standards and learned to play together and improvise together. We were also given one to one tutoring for jazz, and this is where as a pianist I was mainly taught how to construct jazz chords and how to improve my comping and improvising.
After all of this mentoring, we finished our experience playing in many concerts around the town, such as a piano concert in the Greek Synagogue, and a jazz night on the terrace of the city’s wine cellar, where we played in our band. Alongside our mentoring we were able to enjoy the experience at our own leisure too, where plenty of free time across the days gave way to exploring the town, meeting new friends and going to various concerts given by teachers and fellow students in the evening, spanning from a sublime performance of Sibelius’ 2nd symphony, opera scenes, brass bands and even flute beatboxing!
Overall I will never forget this experience and definitely recommend to anyone interested, the people I met were so fun and there were so many countless new experiences I had there which I will never forget.
I am in great gratitude to the Cathedral for funding this trip and to Mrs Ruzsics, whose idea it was to send me in the first place. To them I am forever grateful.
