About the Hungarian Trombone Camp festival

The idea came from a DVD called Billie's Bootcamp(aerobic) which I was inspired many years a go, and later, the idea formulated and developed through chatting with my friends Zoltan Kiss and Csaba Wagner. The goal was to organize a trombone festival which is unique and that the numbers of the teacher's in the festival is at least 70% Hungarian. Since 1995 there has been no International Trombone Festival in Hungary, and my dream was to create an event and happenings, combining all the good ideas from several international trombone festivals in the world, to a which participants will be most happy and satisfied. I like to create the platform where I can share and to continue the great Hungarian Trombone school and it's tradition which I am very proud of.

   The idea came to us in 2016 summer. After the last Christmas, Zoltan and I began to fix the details and by beginning of February we opened the online application. The toughest part was to create the general schedule at the end, which took us six months. The PR and organizing concerts as well took much effort and many hours. There were many discussions and meetings with Zoltan during the process and it worked most efficient that I was in charge of administrative part on my own. It was overwhelming amount of work behind PC, and in a meanwhile Zoltan being busy with collecting sponsors and participants. We committed ourselves executing different roles and that was the key to the success of our festival.

   The concept was that every student get lesson from every teacher. The basic idea was to give at least 6 times 30 minutes individual lessons for the students. 

   I am glad we had many great artists and the artistic level of the concerts was outstanding. 8 concerts in total during 4 days. The opening concert began with The Hungarian Trombone Connection (trombone octet) joined by Marshall Gilkes. The recitals and concerts were performed by artists/ professors, either in solo performance or in ensemble. The Lätzsch Trombone Quartet in a first recital presented by The Lätzsch company. Denson Paul Pollard played an outstanding recital as well the world reknown Corpus Trombone Quartet. In the final jazz concert, playing a jam session with Marshall who was a main jazz professor and Eric Budd from Australia who is a multi talented brass player and a great pedagogue, for the jazz students were a great exciting opportunity.

   Our plan is to organize the HTBC annually. The next festival will be held in June 2018. We will post the new date of the festival soon on our website.

It was a great pleasure and learning experience for me to get to know wonderful musicians and to collaborate as a team having a strong feeling of solidarity and friendship (teachers), it was a great joy for me. The atmosphere of these conversations were fantastic and fun when we had opportunity at the end of the day discussing, sharing our experiences and exchanging ideas. I also wanted to share the Hungarian spirit/culture by hosting some of the members at my own home, I wanted to make guests feel welcome and at home in token of gratitude for coming to join our first boot camp in Hungary.

Until the first day of the festival I couldn't believe that my dream will actually come true. I hoped and prayed that everything will be all right, but almost until the last moment we did not see how we will manage the financial part of the festival. Fortunately, we received generous sponsorship from the Schagerl, as well Buffet Crampon, Lätzsch, Edwards and the K&G. Thanks to these sponsors, we came through succesfully. In my opinion, creating a festival for the first time like this Bootcamp is very risky without experience, but I believed that the participants, invited artists and professors will trust us enough to come join our first camp in Budapest. The most challenging part for us was at the beginning, where everything had to be created from zero, but we can use these experiences in the future. I am really motivated to organize the second edition, after having the feedbacks from our survey that almost 100% responded that they would like to come back to our next camp.