The sweet sound of a Chopin waltz ripples around the gothic vaulting and stained glass of Glasgow University. These are played by a young pianist from Poland now migrated to UK. Aleksander Kudajczyk, fresh from his music studies and seeing no future in Poland, stepped on a plane at Krakow Airport and flew to Prestwick.
So where to find this talented pianist's pieces? Perhaps we can grab a CD from the local stores and bring back home to enjoy. Or perhaps he has his own music school that we can send our kids to learn from this young, brilliant chap.
Believe it or not, Aleksander actually working as a janitor at the Glasgow University! In the hope of finding a teaching job after arriving in UK, instead he found himself working a few hours a day as a cleaner in Glasgow University's School of Law, starting every morning at 7am. It still earns him around $800 a month, more than what he earn in Poland for teaching music. In Poland, he believes he would be getting around 900 Polish zloties ($320) teaching music.
Eventually, the urge to play began to stir and he asked if he could practice on the grand piano in the chapel, just across the quadrangle from the law school. His casual performance was picked up on the chapel's webcam by astonished staff who suddenly became aware of the talent they had in their midst, hidden under a cleaner's overall. Chaplaincy secretary Joan Keenan said his music was so amazing that colleagues also logged on to watch. Since then, the University invited him to play a concert of Chopin pieces during Glasgow's West End Festival and received a rapturous applause from the audience.
Amazingly, this real life story is strikingly resemblance of the movie Good Will Hunting in 1997. Though Will Hunting acted by Matt Damon has genius-level intelligence such as a talent for memorizing facts and an intuitive ability to prove sophisticated mathematical theorems, he works as a janitor at MIT.
One day, Will solved a difficult graduate-level math problem that Professor Gerald Lambeau, a Fields Medalist and combinatorialist, left on a chalkboard as a challenge to his students and hoping someone might solve the problem by the semester's end. Everyone at MIT wonders who solved it, and Lambeau puts another problem on the board, one that took he and his colleagues two years to prove. Will is discovered in the act of solving the problem, and Lambeau initially thinks that Will is vandalizing the board and chases him away. When Will turns out to have solved it correctly, Lambeau tries to track Will down.
Source : BBC News
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Janitor's hidden talent
Posted by
Dominic
at
5:45 PM
Labels: Europe, Unbelievable humans, Unbelievable stories
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