My name is Kingston Czjakowski.

I'm a senior at Cairo-Durham High School and I play the piano.

I played Chopin's Barcarolle, opus 60.

The barcarolle is meant to imitate a Venetian gondola song.

So I like to picture a boat going down a canal in Venice late at night.

There are moments in this song that are very relaxing, but it becomes much more introspective and eventually triumphant in the end.

This piece really tells a story.

It begins with the currents of water on the canal being represented by the left hand of the piano, and in the right hand there's a duet, perhaps sung between two lovers.

But the narrative quickly becomes internal and it becomes emotional and psychological music.

And as the piece develops, we go further and further into sort of the depths of the human soul, almost.

And we finally reach this moment where the music seems like it's coming from another world.

And Chopin writes dolce sfogato and dolce is a very common musical instruction, meaning sweetly, but I've never seen before, and it means smoky.

And this music comes through the smoke, almost like it's delivered from some other universe.

And only four measures later, Chopin brings us back to Earth, and the piece concludes as it began on that Venetian canal.

This piece is not technically as difficult as most of Chopin's work.

It still has a lot of tricky finger work, but most of the difficulty in this piece is in making it work structurally and emotionally.

It's very difficult to pull it off convincingly because the narrative is so complex and layered, and you really have to communicate that depth in your playing.

I played this out of competition, and one of the judges told me it was a grandpa piece, because it's most often played by older people, because it takes so much musical maturity, and I'm just on that path.

My conductor and teacher,Etienne Abelin, who I work with at Empire State Youth Orchestra, nominated me.

I'd like to thank my piano teacher, Mary Moran, for guiding me through the interpretation of this piece.

I'd like to thank my percussion teachers, Mark Foster and Richard Albagli, for always believing in me and showing me how to really love music and have a reverence for sound.

And I want to thank my parents for being the biggest supporters of everything I do in my life.