Royal Conservatory of Liege
speciality: Art & Design

Studying at the Royal Conservatory of Liège is quite active and interesting. There are both pluses and minuses. There is a very big age gap between students – there are people who are 17 y.o. and there are those who are over 50. There is also a very big difference in the level of playing of students, there are people who have already graduated from several conservatories and started studying in Liège just to get a diploma of a different level, and there are those who are just starting their musical journey. I see both pluses and minuses in this, since you can’t always accurately assess your level in relation to other students. There are many interesting and useful lessons, but compared to Ukrainian educational institutions, It feels like we don’t have enough time for special subjects (in my case, violin performance). If in Ukraine, I had 2-3 lessons a week, then here only 1. The same goes for the orchestra, here there are only 2 orchestral concerts a year, the preparation for which takes only 2 weeks, and during the academic year there is no such practice. There are problems with the organization of the educational process and inaccuracies from the administration, it’s a bit hard to get the appointments with administration if you need to solve some kind of problems.

Also, do not expect to have perfect grades. There is not a completely fair assessment of your performing skills or knowledges (you’ll never get 20/20, the maximum for me was 18, that is such a great grade).

Here you need to speak French, because it’s so complicated to speak in English with people at the conservatory and in the city in general. I mean, some of the profs speak well, but they will be not happy, that you don’t understand what they’re saying during the classes (you will almost never get a translation of the lesson, you need to do it yourself).

The best thing here is the chamber music classes, because teachers are really good qualified and so nice. You’ll choose project that you like and you’ll have no press and in the end it’s so beautiful to play great music with the people that you choose for your group.

The building is not really clean, but has such a great big hall that is the same to the philharmonic hall.

Some people here are nice, but there are also a lot of strange one that don’t even know how to play, so they going to the conservatory to make some fun, but they will have the same rights as you have or even more. Be prepared that it’s more complicated to find Belgium friends there without speaking in french, but there are a lot of other nationalities that are even better)