The summer of 2024 was very special for me. I had just finished my high school diploma and now I continued with the piano without a break. I was happy because I could finally practice as much as I wanted, which was often a problem during school. But it started, and the first festival of the summer was the Perugia Music Festival. I was selected to play in the Young Star Concert and I played in two master classes. With Ilana Vered and Hung-Kuan Chen. I also had numerous very interesting lessons, for example with Matteo Cardelli and Irina Chistiakova. I learned an incredible amount this week, especially what it means to deal with nervousness. This accompanied me like a straitjacket before every performance. As a result, some performances in Perugia went less well than others, but by the end of the festival I managed to pick up certain techniques for dealing with stage fright that I wish I had known at the beginning of the festival, especially in Hung-Kuan Chens Masterclass, in which my nervousness turned the performance of Beethoven Sonata No. 31 Op. 110 into a not-so-pleasant result haha. My good friend the pianist Sulayman Human took this photo of me after the master class:
The highlight of the Perugia Music Festival was clearly the performance with the orchestra. With the great conductor Eitan Globerson and the Perugia Festival Orchestra I performed the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 54 on. The first dress rehearsal didn’t go well at all. It was the first time I played with an orchestra and I was terribly excited. Suddenly I was no longer alone on stage, but I had to pay attention to an orchestra and the conductor. With the support of Mr. Globerson and my teacher Yossi Reshef, we corrected a few mistakes after the rehearsal and I felt much more confident at the beginning of the concert in the evening. The concert went pretty well, except for a few bars in the cadenza, but let’s not talk about that. Overall, my debut with an orchestra was a great experience for me and I have fond memories of the Perugia Music Festival.
