Stefan Heucke: The Selfish Giant, op.20a
Educational Project

In January 2009 while in Austria and searching through Schott's published works for piano duo, we found a very interesting one by Stefan Heucke, The Selfish Giant, op.20a for piano-4 hands and narrator, and ordered it. It is based on the famous fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. Upon our return to Greece we started sight-reading it and time by time we came up with the idea of presenting it to students at schools as an educational project. This happened to take place in Holland in May 2009. Although it was a great challenge for us since we had never organized or presented a work for such an occasion, the overall result was quite unexpected for the school students and staff as well as for us.

From this experience in Holland we came to realize how important it is to present such projects to children at their early and mid teens. In today's world where the mind is the greatest target of all mass media, the worst being television, these students are given the opportunity to create an idea through live experience and to choose whether they would like to accept or reject this kind of art. The essential part in this is not to make them like what they heard and saw, but to give them the opportunity to decide on their own, either positive or negative.