The City of Győr honors Harold!

From the Mozart Cafe we walked a short distance to the City Hall where Harold was presented with an official citation of appreciation by the city of Győr. We were ushered into what appeared to be a conference room with a stunning batik-looking mural hanging on one of the walls. I never found out the medium in which it was created, but its vision of the city of Gyor was so much more engaging than other such examples of civic art. Győr's roots can be traced at least to the Celtic invasions in the 5th century B.C., if not to the Bronze Age; digging deeper into the murky past, some sources suggest that Győr may have been settled as early as the 3rd millennium B.C. when the Celts were moving into Hungary. This mural captures the colorful and tumultuous history of the city.




Harold holding the citation given to him by the Minister of Culture, a gracious man who gave his speech in Hungarian, which was then translated by one of his young women assistants. We all smiled when she referred to Alma as "the Apple Cantata." Alma, of course, means "apple" in Hungarian, and I like thinking of this cantata in that way.







Harold, David Zsolt Kiraly, and moi.(David's family name is Kiraly which means "king" in Hungarian) David is a composer, having written ballets in particular. but he is also the president of the Kiraly Music Network (KMN), an organization he founded to connect foreign (mainly American) composers and Hungarian orchestras.