“Faust” is not only a very famous drama from the very famous German writer Wolfgang Goethe: DER FAUST is also the title of the most important award in German theatre. Awarded by the Deutscher Bühnenverein, alongside the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Künste and the Kulturstiftung der Länder, DER FAUST honours those extraordinary artistic achievements that reflect the diversity of the theatrical landscape in Germany. The 2024 prize for the “Best Music Theatre Production” goes to Ingo Kerkhof for the German premiere of György Kurtág’s Fin de partie in March at the Oper Dortmund.

More than six years of publishing work have concluded with the publication of the male choir volume, completing the three-volume edition of Kodály's choral works.
ZOLTÁN KODÁLY (1882–1967) created a significant oeuvre equally as a composer, pedagogue, and ethnomusicologist; he was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Hungarian music. With his over 130 works for unaccompanied choir he laid the foundation of modern Hungarian choral literature.

György Kurtág's opera based on Samuel Beckett's text has had 32 stage and concert performances in 8 countries so far. The work arrived at another venue on its international journey: in October, it will be performed five times on the stage of the Vienna State Opera House.

The award ceremony took place on 3 September in Budapest at the Budapest Music Center, where György Kurtág has lived and worked since 2015. The Board of Trustees of the Wolf Foundation was represented by Amnon Rechner, and Yacov Hadas-Handelsman, Ambassador of the State of Israel in Budapest and Ferenc Hudecz, Vice President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were present at the ceremony. Upon receiving the award, the 98-year-old composer was moved to thank his late wife, Márta Kurtág (1927-2019), who was his companion for 73 years, and his closest friend and colleague, András Wilheim musicologist (1949-2022), who took care of his works for more than four decades at UMP Editio Musica Budapest.

’We live in an age full of impulses. We encounter countless stimuli and impacts every day. We immerse ourselves in a book, we receive an email in the meanwhile, read it on our phone, and, since we are at it already, we also check the news. Our sense of time has also changed.’ (Balázs Kecskés D.)

 After the 24 character pieces of the first volume of the Wolf-Temperiertes Klavier (2018) and the 24 Jazz-Preludes of the second volume (2022), Péter Wolf continued the series with a new volume of 23 pieces that he composed for the youngest pianists.

We salute Zsolt Serei on his 70th birthday with the recording of Serenade für Horn and Orchestra.  Componensemble is conducted by the composer. (BMC Records 073)  More about the work here.

A few weeks after his 80th birthday on 24 March 2024, PÉTER EÖTVÖS, composer, conductor and teacher, an outstanding figure of Hungarian and international contemporary music, passed away. Many of us knew this was imminent because of the illness that plagued him for the past year—which he bore with steadfast optimism and patience—as it shows no mercy to anyone. His passing was unexpected, regardless, and his music remained a constant on the international and Hungarian concert scene throughout his illness, even when he himself as a conductor was no longer able to participate in performances. He worked until his last months. His last opera, Valuska, premiered in Budapest in December 2023 at the Hungarian State Opera. In 2023, he was still able to complete his Harp Concerto, which premiered in Paris in January this year. The Hungarian premiere of Focus (Saxophone Concerto) took place a few days ago in Budapest.

"I search, I experiment, I take risks," he said in an interview—and he did. His work was dedicated to seeking new paths, expanding further possibilities in classical and contemporary music genres and, even more importantly, exploring hidden dimensions of sound. He began composing at the age of fourteen, and his compositional oeuvre encompassed almost every genre. His music is influenced by his Hungarian roots (Liszt, Bartók, Kodály) and by the greatest innovators and discoverers of the post-WW2 era (Stockhausen and Boulez), but these influences were only the starting points for him to generate his own compositional world.

László Vidovszky's six-decade career as a composer includes almost 200 compositions, many genres and even more groundbreaking ideas, and is still growing. Schroeder's Death, 405, Narcissus and Echo are emblematic pieces of experimental music that appeared in Hungary in the 70s and 80s. And his later works - the 12 Duos, the Zwölf Streichquartette, Reverb and Promenade - are evidence of how the patterns built into his own inventions in the 70s became the basic elements of his own compositional style, now polished to classical purity.

We salute László Vidovszky on his 80th birthday with the recording of the 4th movement of Promenade composed for chamber ensemble. The Ligeti Ensemble is conducted by András Keller. (BMC Records 294)