Sunday, July 16, Great Hall of the Student Cultural Center at 21.00
CONCERT OF THE WORLD YOUTH CHOIR, Hungary

The World Youth Choir is an international musical, pedagogical and social project of high artistic quality, which gathers once in each year for a rehearsal session and a concert tour and collects young, talented, semi-professional singers from all around the world, selecting them through an international audition and recruitment system and putting them in one choir, which is led by renowned conductors. Since the foundation of the World Youth Choir in 1989, during 35 organized tours, more than 1000 singers from 65 countries had the opportunity to participate in this project, collaborated with 46 world-famous conductors and released more than 20 CD and DVD recordings.
This year the choir will be comprised of 58 singers from 33 countries from all over the world and will perform a repertoire of two different musical genres at concerts. Zoltán Pad from Hungary will conduct classical and contemporary pieces, folk arrangements and church music with a number of songs selected from the tour countries. Ken Wakia from Kenya will conduct African folk tunes, African-American spirituals and contemporary world music.

Zoltán Pad (Hungary) studied with Péter Erdei in Budapest and with Michael Gläser in Munich. In 2008 he worked as choir leader at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. Between 2009 and 2014, he was chief conductor of Kodály Choir Debrecen, which is one of the few professional choirs in Hungary.  Since 2014 he has been chief conductor of the Hungarian Radio Choir. As choir master he worked with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, with Daniel Harding, Péter Eötvös and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He had concerts with all the professional mixed choirs in Hungary, and he is also a welcomed guest at professional choirs in Europe. Between 2009 and 2014 he was a member of the Artistic Board of Béla Bartók International Choir Competition. In 2013 and 2014 he was an artistic director of the contest. Zoltán Pad is an Associate Professor at the Liszt Academy’s Kodály Institute, where he is working with non-Hungarian students, teaching choral conducting and choir literature.

Ken Wakia (Kenya) studied choral conducting at the University of Miami in Florida, U.S.A., as a Fulbright Scholar. He is the founding director of one of Kenya’s top choral groups and internationally acclaimed the Nairobi Chamber Chorus, and the Safaricom choir, a work-place choir for employees of Kenya’s largest mobile phone company, a subsidiary of Vodafone. Ken has conducted choirs in Kenya, the US and Europe, including Europa Cantat Junior Choir. Ken is known for bringing a wide range of musical styles to his choirs, including arrangements of traditional African folk tunes, African-American spirituals, classical and contemporary compositions. Besides his active musical life, Ken currently promotes local and international culture and education as the Cultural and Educational Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Embassy, Nairobi.