Life at the Liszt Academy

Hello, it's me again! However this time I'm typing on a Hungarian keyboard so I bet proof-reading this post is going to take me a while... Having pledged you another post before Sunday, I then realised I actually don't have much time before then to get everything down into words! Although I don't feel ridiculously busy, I look back and notice that I've certainly squeezed a lot into the last few weeks. I also noticed I haven't told you much about studying yet so considering it's kind of the main reason I'm in Budapest, here's attempt no.2 to let you know what I've been up to;

Luckily after a few lessons I'm pleased to say I can now keep up with the pace of the BA2 Music Theory class, just about! We've covered harmonic analysis of Classical and Romantic styles of music and now we're learning how to analyse the form - binary, ternary and rondo so far. Sounds a lot like stuff we already learnt at school right? I thought so too but was proved very wrong when we used terms such as "periods" and "sentences" to describe shorter passages and even discovered mini ternary elements within a piece in ternary form - composers continue to amaze me. They are so much more intelligent than we realise when we just scratch the surface in listening to a piece!

Did I tell you students can get free tickets to ALL of the concerts held here at the Liszt Academy? Pretty cool right, so obviously I've been making the most of the opportunity. The highlight concert so far is definitely Máv Symphony orchestra when they played Dvorák symphony no.9 "New World". What a fantastic piece, especially when preceded by Elgar's cello concerto, what a wonderful evening! As we had bought tickets for this concert we had the privilege of sitting behind the stage so I rather enjoyed peering over the woodwind and brass section's shoulders to follow their music...

Piano recital

Despite the unbeatable sound of a full symphony orchestra, I've also been to a piano trio chamber concert (piano, violin, cello) and a solo piano recital as well as other orchestral works. There is certainly a strong theme of patriotism running through the concert programmes given the amount of Liszt and Bartók that is played! Kodály, Dohnányi and Ligeti also seem to be very popular and I just love how music is such a core part of the culture here, not least in the fact the concert hall is nearly always full (take note England) and there are so many streets and squares named after their composers, it makes me so happy!

Oh also, how could I forget to mention the beautiful Grand Hall and its attention to detail? I noticed during the interval of the last concert there are paintings depicting musical terms, as you can see here with "Scherzo", built into each corner for those in the balconies to enjoy! Student seats really are the best sometimes.

So last Friday we had a trumpet masterclass with Bruce Hellmers, former Principal trumpet of the Australian Opera and Ballet orchestra and fortunately for me, it was all in English hooray! I'm not sure how much some of the Hungarian students got out of it but I'm hoping they understood at least some of his expressions and the slightly odd accent... It was really nice to meet some more trumpet students anyway since I had only met my teacher's 3 other students up until then. Although I didn't play in the masterclass, I still benefited greatly from hearing other people play as everyone seems to be playing the same 2 pieces in preparation for the competition in December, myself included. I'm going to be sick of hearing the Haydn and Böhme trumpet concertos by the end of this term!

Other things at the Liszt Academy you might ask? They're all pretty cool too, I just can't go into detail about them all or we'll be here all night. Trumpet lessons are kind of important though and the delights of having 2 a week mean I tend to put in twice as much work as I normally would! They're good fun and generally consist of me playing something (not up to standard 90% of the time) followed by my teacher playing it perfectly and giving me direction to improve combined with mutual translation lessons of a variety of words! Teaching him "diaphragm" was hilarious.

Time to go and practice again and then watch the Budapest Gypsy Orchestra in concert, have a great weekend!

S x