From April 7th to May 17th, 2025, pianist Bogdan Vaida and composer Anamaria Meza will be on the national tour Classic for Kids - Mozart and the Jungle, a series of music education workshops dedicated to children and parents. More details from Bogdan Vaida in a chat with Ioana Țintea.

Mr. Bogdan Vaida, Classic for Kids is an educational project that you initiated 2 years ago. How did this idea come about and what inspired you to create such a project?

In recent years, more and more children and their parents have been coming to the concerts of our core project, Classic Unlimited, and it's obvious that a normal concert for grown-ups can be a bit too long for children. That's why we thought of doing a special project especially for children.

In the beginning, 2 years ago, the first edition was an experiment. We had absolutely no idea what to expect and it was a pleasant surprise for us not only musically, but especially in terms of the children's joy and the joy we came across everywhere we went.

The tour takes place in schools and communities in rural areas or small towns where children don't often have access to this kind of musical experience. What are the main objectives you are pursuing with this project?

As I told you, the first edition was an experiment. Then we did concerts both in big cities like Cluj or Alba-Iulia, as well as in smaller cities and in rural areas, and we noticed that where children have less access to this kind of events or cultural events in general, they were more appreciative and curious, and our concerts and workshops had a very strong effect on them. So many children saw probably for the first time in their lives a piano, they looked at it like a marvel and they reacted incredibly to the music, to the stories behind the music, so we decided to focus on rural areas, on small towns because we want our event to have as strong an impact as possible and to be as useful as possible for the children. That is the main goal, to show children the music for what it is and that there are stories behind the notes. In the case of this year's program, there are animals behind the music.

Tell us about the "Mozart and the Jungle" edition. What surprises did you have in store for little music lovers?

In the first edition I put together pieces that I thought were suitable for children and by the end of the tour, after the 10 concerts, the children had assigned an animal to each piece in the program, so the second edition was based on Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals. And this year we have a special surprise for them - four contemporary composers have written special animal-themed pieces for them. We have one piece imitating a cat, one a wolf, an ant, butterflies, stories about foxes, monkeys pulling a tiger by the tail and so on. It's an absolutely unique program and I find them to be real musical gems written by Cristian Bence-Muk, ȘerbanMarcu, Ciprian Pop and Anamaria Meza.

I will start the program with a piece by Mozart, as I have done in every edition so far, because Mozart was one of the most representative composers of classical music and because he wrote music when he was the age of the children who are listening to us in this project.

What are the most common questions asked by young children?

They are curious about instruments, music, composers... anything.

The first part is a children's concert and the second part is a workshop where they play with us. We have what has become quite a large amount of instruments in the meantime; mostly simple percussion instruments that the children can play with and accompany us in the workshop, using pieces that they heard in the first part, in the concert. We do body beat on Mozart pieces and this year we also have mini-keyboards that children can play and we are going to try to form, so to speak, the Classic Orchestra for Kids and play together.