Silvia Kekenák et Andrea Ferencei
Slovakia
Kosice
MSGA Girls Choir, Kosice – Slovakia
The MSGA Girls Choir was established in 1989, 20 years after the Children´s Choir started working. Members of the choir are 12-23 years old and they all attend our school or are our former students. Many of our singers sing parallelly in 2 choirs (the children´s and the girls’ choir) and thus we can reach the continuous revival of the choirs. There are always a few university students who do not stop working with us even after they finish their secondary school studies.
We have to mention there is no special music education at our school and many of our singers have never visited music schools. It is the passion for singing together what makes us continue in this beautiful tradition of choral singing. The choir has weekly afternoon rehearsals as an extra-curricular activity. Before competitions we have regular morning sessions and twice a year we organise a weekend rehearsal as well. Every September the choir takes part in a 4-day choir camp where we start mastering the new season´s repertoire.
We are proud to represent our town, our region and country but also our Hungarian national minority living in Slovakia. Our repertoire stretches from the renaissance up to the 21st century. We love singing a capella and accompanied pieces as well. We put a lot of emphasize on mastering unison singing via Hungarian folk songs and we also love their arrangements. We mostly sing in Hungarian, Slovak, Latin, English and Italian.
The Girls´ Choir ranks among the best artistic groups in Slovakia. These are some of our successes reached in the past few years:
The conductors of the choir are: Mrs Silvia Kekenák and Mrs Andrea Ferencei, both are former choir members and what´s more, Mrs Kekenak is the daughter of the founder of our choirs.
The conductors have been working together for more than 20 years at the same school and they have developed and shared a flourishing cooperation which is based on mutual respect, joy in teaching young people and love of choral singing.