We always love to shout about the amazing musical lives our teachers lead outside of The Music Place and this week, we’re showing off again. If you’ve got it, flaunt it baby! Yes, this week we’re dedicating the blog to lovely woodwind and piano teacher Kezia and her prestigious saxophone adventure in Switzerland!
In the summer of 2021, Kezia took her classical chops to Switzerland to attend a week-long course at The Arosa Academy for classical music. Following this, she was awarded the prestigious Hans-Schaeuble award for Saxophone which won her a concert engagement at the Arosa Klassik Festival!
This March, Kezia put together a quartet for the concert and journeyed to Switzerland for the festival. The quartet played two evening recitals, one in Arosa and a second in Zurich, performing several pieces within a seventy-five minute repertoire, including saxophone quartets by Glazunov and Richard Rodney Bennett. The group had only four days to practise together before the performance and were averaging eight hours of intense rehearsal per day. That rivals even our practice-a-thon winners!
Kezia was also honoured to have world renowned saxophonist, Valentine Michaud, accompany the quartet for one of their pieces – for those of us out of the loop, she’s a big deal, a veritable Beyonce of the classical saxophone world.
We asked Kezia how she felt about the award and performing in Switzerland,
“I’m honoured to have been given the Hans-Schaeuble award and the opportunity to perform in the beautiful Switzerland! Playing with Valentine Michaud was amazing – she’s one of the best sax players in the world – and she designs her own dresses! This was one of my first concerts after lockdown and it’s such a great one to do for the first one back. Amazing to be performing again.”
We’re so proud of Kezia and really excited to see what she does next! Our teachers are great. Okay, we’ll stop showing off now. But they are…
Have a lovely week everyone!
