The last two weeks have been spent making decisions and finalizing sheet music so that we can already know our professional "destinations" for our creative camp starting on Monday - at least as accurately as we do for geographical ones. Budapest - Zsennye, Zsennye - Vienna, Vienna - Budapest: this is what we visit in four days. It also has a few hundreds of kilometers, but the three days of the creative camp, we suspect, once again fly us light years away: unpredictable distances from the safe playground of our comfort zone(s), together and separately, finding ourselves in different galaxies song by song.
At the village of Zsennye there's a fairytale castle in Vas county, once owned by the Sennyey-Bezerédj-Békássy families. It was badly damaged in World War II, its equipment was dismantled, then the castle was nationalized in 1949 and was used by the local producer cooperative for warehouse and office - hens and grain were kept in the suites of the main residence. Nearly five hundred trees were cut down from the park, and the great plan was to demolish the entire castle and plow the arboretum. At that time (1953), however, the sculptor Károly Majtényi from Szombathely took the stage and went so that the producer cooperative could get an area elsewhere, and he could establish an artist colony here with the artists living in the county. This marked the beginning of a new era: artists went from room to room, rebuilding the ruined castle with manual work and creating a nationwide community.
The memory of the former collective work is also preserved by the walls - and many, many centuries of human, family and cultural history. That’s why we like so much to spend a few days here too, and writing this rich and twisting chronicle with our presence and meeting people who also create or relax there. The Vaskarika County Cultural Portal also reported on our stay last year: http://vaskarika.hu/hirek/reszletek/19142/jazzation_koncert_a_kastelyban_verseles_a_parkban/
We are planning to give a home concert in the castle again this year, and we will hold the closing concert of our creative camp in Vienna: on July 15 from 7 pm at the Collegium Hungaricum. We are looking forward to meeting our friends in Vienna and those who come for us. Here you can register for the concert with a name and phone number: anmeldung@collegiumhungaricum.at
We hope to see you there, at least when we go live from the Castle of Zsennye! :)